Mam and Me Enamelled

Had a great day in Shrewsbury today at the Enamel Guild. Pat Johnson was doing a riso screen workshop. We saw several of the screen print enamels Pat had made and she showed us how she achieved some of the results. We were then taken through how to make the screens and as we had been asked to bring some pictures that we would like as a screen it was up to us to make our enamelled piece. I had a lovely pic of mam and me when I was up visiting her a couple of years ago so I thought I would give it a try. Unfortunately the photo was quite dark but this is what I achieved and I love it.
I fired a black to the back of the copper and then fired two layers of dove grey to the front. The background was then enamelled with shades of dove grey, lavender and mid blue and then a spring green was added to give a constrast. This was fired again and when cool I sifted a black through the screen to capture our image. The result was better than I expected and I'll certainly be trying out more screens to see what I come up with.

Enamelled buttons

I don't know how many times I say 'doesn't time fly' because I just seem to go months without writing anything for my blog; but here I am again several months down the line and I've finally managed to get on to write something.

I've been quite busy lately with workshops and have been enamelling some buttons with different designs. I listed some of them on Folksy and my sheep ones sold at the beginning of the week so I was really thrilled. I do enjoy making them and I guess the weekend might just see me doing some more. I hand paint them so they are never identical.

This second set that I did had a scragfitto design and I wrote the word button on one of them.

The photos of the buttons are not the best but I do like these blue ones that I did. Infact they were some of the first buttons I made.

And here's just some pics of other buttons I've made. As I said, the photographs are not very good but it gives you an idea of what you can do with a piece of copper and enamel powders.