Enamelling Experiments at the Gaffa



My Sunday was spent at the Gaffa Gallery, a gallery and studios in the Sydney city centre that has a jewellery focus. Wanting to do the enamelling course for a while, today was the first of 2 Sundays with the excellent and very patient teacher, Alida.

We learnt the basics and made several trial pieces. It is not the sort of thing you can replicate at home in a high-rise apartment as your need a kiln and a serious extractor fan , but it is worth doing the get the creative juices going - mine have stalled for a quite a few weeks due to a sick mum (now on the mend after breast cancer, and doing very well) and some intense emotionally draining weeks at the day job.

Here are my experiments, some successful, so not so much! Apologies for some of the photo quality - the afternoon light is fading here but I was keen to post on the blog as it has been a while.
We played with plain glazes, glass rods and dots. I think that my favourites are the white pieces.

 Next Sunday will be spent on creating more finished projects.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

So much for a bead diet ...

Image
So do stringing supplies count ? (shh my etsy friends from whom I have ordered beads during a supposed bead diet .. our little secret ... - it is hard enough giving up nice food, chocolate etc during the festive party season, let alone stay on a bead diet too.... at least beads aren't fattening!) I found a source of affordable Japanese chirimen cord in Japan called Fabric Tales and went (a wee bit) crazy - I have a thing for Japanese prints, have a decent stash of Japanese fabrics, and now will put these gorgeous cords to use in some creations over the holidays. Max, ever the curious cat, seems to have taken a shine to them too as you can see in the photo. Made sale no.2 on my 3 month old Etsy shop  - my Oriental Dreaming necklace which used the Chirimen cord (from another source) and was personal favorite. Sales have been slow but I guess don't mind (not too much.anyway...) as I keep reminding myself that this is my creative time, and that things take time to build.
Read more

Pattern and texture

Image
I am always looking for new ways to create both pattern and where possible with polymer clay, texture.  The bargello technique where you cut a patterned sheet into stripes and reassemble fits the bill nicely, whilst also helping me use up my rather big stash of canes I've made over the past few years, particularly all those stripes. I love the quilt look but with a modern edge. I'm also finding with all these on line meetings that I'm wearing studs a lot so I always try to include some in each collection.  It is a very limited range - it is quite time intensive to produce.   We are about to enter week 15 of lockdown / working at home in Sydney, so my brain doesn't cope with too much fiddly design at the moment, given my day job is also design. These have taken a while to get from studio to the store. I hope you like them as much as I do.   
Read more

Colour makes us happy

Image
  Dots pendants range  Have been having a few flat weeks of late, I think it's the day-in-day-out routine without a lot of long term planning or outings, and it kind of zaps the creative mind. .   So I decided to play with some colours that were mood lifting. When it comes to my beading and clay work I'm not much of a detailed planner - I just see where it takes me on the day. I dug out a digital art image that I'd saved to Pinterest a long while ago that had a palette that jumped at me - this was the inspiration for my colour mixes for my 2 slabs. I find slab work very time consuming - I agonise over placement which is a bit silly as its going to be cut up anyway, but that's just how I am.  It was worth it as these pieces make me very happy.   Several of these pieces sold quickly, with a couple of pairs of earrings on their way to the US to a dear repeat customer.  I'm always so excited when my work sells - even after all this time I still do a happy dance !  That&
Read more