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Here are some of the projects from this spring.  A quick outing in the heat of an early summer and then home to play with clay!  To see more click CAB’z and go to Flicker.

CAB'z Photos on Flickr

After weeks and months of gloom, doom, and white stuff, the sum came out. Proof positive that spring must be here!

Black and white are going to be big this summer.  I started thinking about designs.  Here’s a fun one to get things started while I roll a couple more ideas around.  A few flowers, a few butterflies…

CAB'z Photos on Flickr

When all else fails: improvise.

By now everyone working with bronze clays knows getting colorful patinas is unpredictable. What to do; What to do when you are preparing pieces to be fired and need a usable patina?

My experiments using metal clay powder haven’t done so well.  I have lots of powder but no success stories from the kiln.  Not having a programmable kiln means I have to manually try to control the temperature.  Not the most reliable method.  While I save up my courage to try the powder again, I took on a couple other projects that needed some color.  Copper and bronze are compatible. Why not use a copper wash and see what happens?

I took pieces that had been fired previously and some that were unfired.  A little copper powder and some distilled water brushed and dried onto the pieces.  The kiln is unpredictable enough.  I use coconut carbon to fire the bronze.  For backup, in case the color isn’t right, I have a small carton of coal charcoal/carbon.

As luck would have it the first two sets of earrings come out of the coconut carbon sintered and with lovely fall colors – probably from the copper. A little more work on the highlights of the flower petals for contrast and they’ll be ready.

Now for the ones that had been fired previously. They went into the coal carbon and came out with more subtle colors. The woven earrings did not have a copper wash but after being fired the first time they had been buffed to a yellow shiny bronze.  Her Shoe had been fired in coal carbon after being fired in coconut carbon.  Then it was buffed and became very black & shiny.  This time, it went into the coal carbon with a copper wash on the upper part of the shoe.  It came out with a blue cast to the black and rustic colors where the wash was applied.

Autumn Flowers

Autumn Colors

Her Shoe

Woven Bronze

Color didn’t just “return” –  it’s bigger and better!  How did it know to create contrasting colors between the flower pedals with a GREEN background?

CAB'z Photos on Flickr

This piece of bronze clay and its impressed flower design have been fired several times.  It was one of the first pieces I fired and  it went through several more attempts to get colored patina.  In between each firing it was sanded and burnished.  This time it came out of the kiln with better than expected results! It made all those other “failures” worth it.

I stared with fresh charcoal – coconut from Rio Grande – out of the same bag I used in the past. The last 2 full firings have been slightly hotter than the first. I ramped up quickly to 1200F, then took an hour  to reach 1500, allowed the temperature to go up to 1550F for a short time, and then kept it at 1500F for 2 hours.

This time I opened the top of the kiln and when the kiln reached 550F; removed the steel box.  After about 20 minutes, I poured the charcoal through a screen and could see the colors immediately.  Quenched the pieces in water.  I had read about the colors disappearing but I worried anyway!  After fishing them out of the water, the pieces went back to the screen and were set in front of a small fan.

It is the first time I have seen pinks.  In the past only one piece had a little red.  This batch had several with brilliant  red and pink.  One other observation: When I opened the lid and looked at the charcoal, two or three specks of bright blue were visible.