Look what I learned how to make

This past weekend weekend was great. I spent 2 full days learning all about cloisonné and enameling in Ricky Frank's "Introduction to Cloisonné" workshop. People traveled all the way from New York City, Miami, Clearwater, Tennessee, and North Carolina to take this class.

It goes without saying that I love learning new metalworking skills, but the older the method, the better. Cloisonné is an ancient technique that dates back as far as 3,000 years ago and was popular during the Byzantine Empire, how cool is that? The process is intricate, kind of tedious, and requires a lot of patience, but it's so much fun. I learned how to bend and form super thin ribbon-like strips of fine silver (called cloisonné wire) with the finest of tweezers into shapes to form "pictures" or designs on a metal base (in my class we used fine silver sheet as the base for our designs). You paint within the lines of the cloisonné wire with powdered enamel (which is essentially ground up glass), and fire the piece in a kiln. The temperature was set at 1700 degrees Fahrenheit. A couple minutes at that temperature makes the powdered enamel melt back into glass and fuse into place. The process is like painting with damp, colorful sand, placing a few grains at a time in place with a very fine paint brush. Working one thin layer at a time, the piece is fired in the kiln about 10 times, until the enamel is built up to the height of the cloisonné wire.

For the main project we made a couple simple pieces with basic shapes and colors.


In the last few hours of the class we were given time to experiment with our own design.
Here's what I came up with.


I had so much fun in this class. Ricky is a great teacher and a brilliant artist.

Now I have to decide if I like enameling enough to invest the money it would take to equip my studio with a kiln, enamels, and all the other tools I would need...