Earrings That Ended Badly

At the moment I only have two days that I can dedicate to jewellery making, so I usually try to cram in as much as possible. Unfortunately this sometimes ends badly, like today...

I was really pleased with the design of these earrings. I used quite a fetching piece of crackle pottery and shaped it into a drop, and decided I liked it upside down.
The problem happened when I oxidised the piece - the pottery shard absorbed some of the oxidising solution, and turned grey! I tried to rescue the second piece of pottery by removing it from the bezel before oxidising - and broke it :-(

I need to find a way of sealing the cut edges of the shards before I set them, so that it doesn't happen again.

So I have ended up with earrings which I will have to fix - but grinding a piece of pottery to fill a ready made setting is quite tricky, and I don't have enough of that nice crackle shard for two new cabochons...

They would have been nice though!

Here you can see the cab turning grey round the edges
where it absorbed the oxidising solution

This is the only piece of that crackle pottery I have left,
not enough for two earrings!