New Copperclay Pendants

An experiment

This will be a more normal posting for me, as it relfects my jewellery work that I do.

So far I still haven't figured out how to add the links to my jewellery pages, but I am sure I will soon. But for the moment more of this sort of thing can be seen on my Facebook page.  https://www.facebook.com/SteveTheGreenManJewellery/

A while ago I bought some copperclay to conduct some experiments with, which all failed, and I had been meaning to get round to trying out some of my normal pendants in the copper, rather than the normal bronzeclay.

Well here are the results. the Triple Moon, Green Man, Leafy-Awen and Bear Head, are all smaller copies of my the normal once (another experiment).

However, copperclay is far harder to fire correctly, and as I had had to drop the temperature down from what the instructions had said initially for the bronze and silver clays, I had to make a guess as to what temperature to fire these copper pieces at. At first when I started giving them a bash, after I took them out of the kiln, they seemed alright, and then the non-leafy Awen broke; so they hadn't 'sintered' properly (the particles of copper hadn't welded together enough). So I did a bodge-up job of a repair to the Awen (as you can see), and refired the lot again at a higher temperature, and it sorted them out!

Then I found the copperclay pieces need a lot more polishing work to get the effects I wanted than the bronzeclay pendants. So if I do any copperclay work in the future they will have to cost more.