Argument with a door

I had an accident at work and walked into a glass door so have been at home for a week feeling sorry for myself. I'm feeling better now so here are some pictures of the silver and copper pieces I have made in the past 8 weeks or so. I hope you like them

The piece shown here is made of copper clay and silver clay and has been strung on a snake chain along with some rough copper and silver beads I made. I make these small rings or beads with the left over clay from my projects and put them in a box which is the jewellery equivalent of the nuts and bolts tin in every DIYers toolkit. This necklace jangles gently as you move about.

On the right is a copper circle pendant with a textured silver overlay. It's quite big but very light to wear. The copper clay for the base was rolled out and cut then gently formed over a light bulb to give the convex shape.

The image below shows some of my experiments with combining copper and silver clay. The copper sinters at a higher temperature that silver so the copper component needs to be fired before the silver component is added.

The piece with bamboo leaves was made by creating a copper base and using a rubber stamp to impress the bamboo shape. The copper was then fired on the hob and with a butane torch to add extra heat and exclude some of the oxygen which creates fire scale on fired copper. It was fired in this way for ten minutes.  When cool, silver oil paste was used to fill in the pattern and the piece was dried thoroughly. The piece was then fired again with just the butane torch and for two and a half
 minutes to fire the silver. The silver oil paste takes on a glossy slightly pearlescent look which is quite attractive.