Barbara S Fernald Jewelry

Saturday, October 31.  10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

At the home of my friend Val Storms.

19 Burying Hill Road

Greenwich, Connecticut.

Need directions? Call Val at 203 661-5948

Hope to see you there!

Here are some of the earrings I’ll have with me:

The earrings above are designed to reverse from this to this:

Ruh roh! I ordered more, but it won’t be here for a few days!

Time to re-hydrate my unfired scraps, so I can keep making  silver beads to get ready for an upcoming trunk show. Below, one of my favorite tools. The coffee grinder. All sizes and shapes of unfired PMC mistakes go in here. Also all of the PMC dust I’ve saved from sanding.

Ta da! Fluffy and finely ground!

Add distilled water with a sprayer and stir until the clay pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Don’t add too much water or the clay will get too sticky to work with.

This part I added to my re-hydration routine after learning how to mix bronze and copper clay powder from Hadar Jacobson’s blog. Oil the inside of a notebook cover and roll the clay out flat. Keep doing this to condition it.

(Kind of a dorky photo…)

Look how much clay I mixed up compared to 45g of PMC+.

This really works for me in a pinch. The  fired clay is more porous than clay fresh out of the package. If I am making pieces I need to solder after firing, I prefer fresh clay. But this reconstituted version works well for beads with a lot of rough texture, or pieces on which I will apply bits of PMC sheet. Below are the pre-fired pieces I was able to make from that big lump of re-hydrated clay scraps. (Thanks coffee grinder from Rite Aid! You were a bargain for $15!)

Looking east from the mail boat last Saturday morning.

Back home on the island, looking west on Saturday afternoon.

with some of the bronze clay and PMC beads.

Above: Bronze clay with copper clay inlay.

With a little extra time before an appointment in Bar Harbor, I took a spontaneous drive up Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park. The foliage was incredible on the drive up the mountain, but so was the traffic. I had not counted on the steady stream of buses and cars. The top was windy, and there were many people, so I didn’t stay long.

The islands in the distance make up the Town of Cranberry Isles. Islesford is the second island from the left.

I did not notice until I was done, that my new digital camera was not set on the highest quality setting. I took these photos taking at night in my kitchen with the Ott light and no diffuser. (Except for the silver pair of earrings. Those photos were taken using a milk jug over the top to diffuse the light.)  I find it hard to make time to take photographs of my work. But, unless I get better at making time for the photos, the blog goes stale and the Etsy page gets put off for another week…or so! (I’m pretty happy with my little black stick for the earrings. Its a great prop. A piece of driftwood, colored with black magic marker.)

Firing a piece of fine silver wire in place with a bronze clay bead worked, earlier.  (Except for that unexpected crack.)

I polished the bead, then filled the recessed lines with PMC3 fine silver clay. I placed a pair of copper tongs on top of the wire as a heat sink, then torch fired the PMC3, moving the torch back and forth for  90 seconds to sinter the thin layer of silver clay. The bronze bead was a bright orange-y red, and I had my fingers crossed that the heat would not melt the silver wire. It worked! The silver clay even filled in the crack, making it less obvious, almost part of the design. (Um, that’s the way I meant to do it….?)

The bronze clay did seem to turn a little more reddish with the heat from the torch firing. This is one of a pair of earrings. I plan to try it with copper beads as well. The design is to have the bead move freely, 360º,  around the wire. The wire is fired in place, but not stationary. There is no hole in the bottom of the earring bead.

My friend Wanda and I took the day to go to the Common Ground Fair, organized by the Maine Organic Farmers and Growers Association in Unity, Maine. Great crafts, great food, amazing vegetables, and some spectacular……..chickens!

I want some yarn the color of these lower feathers…

Who knew the tasty Cornish game hen had such beautiful black and gold feathers?

What if you tried to give a perm to a pigeon?

This one was just plain scary looking to me!

Some produce booths were more artistic than others. Loved this one with its Chinese lantern and corn stalk walls.

…if you ain’t got that “plink!”  Some bronze and copper clay pieces came out of the kiln fully sintered and some didn’t. Yet they all were fired at the same time. I haven’t done this enough to keep track of where I’ve placed pieces in the kiln to see if that is relevant to which ones sinter and which ones don’t. But, after firing, I have started dropping each piece, from about 2 feet high, onto a table to see if they make that metallic “plink” sound. The pieces that hit with a dull plunk have most likely not sintered properly. These I will tuck in the stainless steel box with my next batch to fire, and I’m pretty sure they will sinter properly when fired again. So far, I can’t tell the difference visually. The earring on the left, below, broke easily when I started to bend it a little. You can see the crumbly brown interior of an unsintered piece of base metal clay. The one on the right made a better sound, and did not start to break, but I will still refire it.

The pieces below seemed to be fine, by the sound of my “drop test.” However, when I polished them with a Scotchbrite wheel,  the copper earrings on the top left clearly had not sintered properly.

Come to think of it, the copper earrings above made more of a “thuddy plink” when I dropped them. I though they sounded metallic enough,  but it was still a little different than the others.  I’ll have to learn to tune my ears to these new bronze and copper clay sounds.

Below are 3 sets of earring components, made with a mix of copper and bronze clay, polished. It’s hard to see the difference between the two metals without applying Baldwin’s Patina to darken the copper. (They all passed the “plink” test!)

With the inlay firing, I thought the thin, sanded tops of the beads might crack, but they did not.

The fine silver wires were not affected by the firing. However, the thicker tops of these beads cracked away from the sides. (I was going to torch fire a silver inlay.)

Because of the silver wires, to fire these beads I placed them flat in the charcoal. The inlaid beads I placed vertically in the charcoal as I usually fire most of my base metal clay pieces. I wonder if the positioning caused the cracks in the beads.

Below is a pair of earrings with copper on top of bronze clay: before and after sanding. But before firing. They’re still in the kiln…