finished the construction and fired it.
decided a bit of gold would look lovely on the tops of the tiny squares and forged ahead with that dad-blasted aura 22.(out of focus, sorry)
it APPEARED that it worked...tiny 1.5mm squares of gold...and then i liver-of-sulfured and got this...
NO GOLD! UGH!
now i have to work up the bravery to cut into the 24k gold sheet i got from allcraft at the conference to try the real keum-boo technique.
wish me luck!
any helpful hints?!
i have to start by removing the liver of sulfur and then burnishing up those squares, right?
3 comments:
Holly, you could just run a little emery paper or one of those white polishing pads over the top of the squares to prepare the surface for keum-boo. Then clean it with soap and water. It will be easier to keep the gold piece in place if its not too smooth. It all gets burnished when you apply the pressure with the agate burnisher.
I think the biggest challenge will be how to place the ring on the metal on the hot plate so the surface of the little squares gets hot enough to bond with the gold when you apply pressure with the burnisher.
Do you have any earrings or flatter designs where most of the piece will be in contact with the hot plate to practice some keum-boo before trying the ring? I'm afraid the ring will be a very frustrating first piece on which to learn keum-boo.
Let's both bring our hot plates to Vermont.I can show you what I know.
By the way, the ring design and that stone are just gorgeous!!!
yay! i was hoping you'd chime in here today! i was wondering that same thing about how to position the ring. i don't have any earrings right now, but i can whip some up...that's a great suggestion, to get comfortable with the technique before trying to tackle that ring. have you ever done keum boo with a brulee torch? seems like i should be able to position the ring straight with a 3rd hand thingy and then hit it with a torch....
I haven't tried it with a torch. Seems like it could get too hot. I've heard of people torch firing the Aura 22 and then burnishing it, but I haven't tried that either. I learned to keum-boo from Jayne Redman, and she does all of hers with a hot plate and agate or Pyrex burnishers. She also works with fine silver and gold sheet, not PMC. Everything starts flat. Check out her work sometime, it's gorgeous!
I bet you'll come up with something that works for you!
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