Leaves

On Saturday, March 29th, my Nick and I woke up early and wound our way down worn back roads to Mt. Vernon where SST Studios is. We arrived at nine in the morning, and Nick left me there while he continued on to Oxford in a quest for various computer bits and pieces from a friend of his. I wandered around to the back of the house and down to the basement level where the studio was split between a large basement room and a barn off to the side of the house. Inside was what Howard Carter would have called "Wonderful things!"

There were kilns, and enamels, and copper, and jeweler's saws, and piles of half-finished projects, and a sink caked with years of copper grime, and respirator masks, and blow-torches, and drills, and fluz, and forging tools, and cats that wound their way through it all. Two of them were named Sherlock and Watson.

I got to stay there from nine in the morning until seven at night creating a shiny branch with leaves on it. The branch is a copper tube that I bent to my specifications and then flattened to hold shape. I then drilled holes into it where I wanted the leaf offshoots to be. I soldered round copper disks to copper wire, and then fed the wires through the branch and soldered them to the back to have a stable base to attach the leaves to. The leaves are pieces of copper that have been both stamped out and then finished off with a jeweler's saw for details. The leaves were then scrubbed and dried and hammered with forging tools to create the veins and more natural bends of the leaf. Then the leaves were sprayed front and back with a flux and coated with a background base enamel on the back and clear glass enamel on the front side. Each leaf was then fired and allowed to cool. After cooling, the front side was sprayed with flux again and color was sifted on in whatever pattern or design desired. And when they were fired again the color layer blended in with the glass layer and the end result is a leaf that looks like it was plucked from the tree just as it began to turn colors and then encased in glass. Each leaf was then attached to the copper branch with silicone. And if I sound extroardinarily detailed and excited it's because I had such a wonderful time getting to work with my hands in a large well-equipped studio again. Plus I got such a nifty project to take home and put on my wall out of it :)

See! There it is on my wall! Between the bookshelf my da made for me and my lamp-post! Also, glass enamel is very difficult to photograph and my walls are not nearly so pink as they look in these pictures. They have a very pleasant brownish reddish look in real life.

Also the artist I was learning glass enamel from made the most wonderful lunch for us. Really delicious. So all in all a pretty much perfect day. Just wanted to share it with all of you.