Spiral Earrings Numbers Three and Four

Today I made two pairs of spiral earrings, one larger, one smaller, with differing results. 

 As I (still) don't have any thick fine silver sheet, I made my own in the rolling mill by melting fine silver scraps and rolling them out. 

I textured the base of both pairs with a scribe, fused the frames on, added jump rings of course, and cleaned them well with a glass brush and ultrasonic cleaner.

I was going to use different colours, but ended up deciding to use the same ones because I want to get these right. Eventually.

I adjusted the design by doing a loose spiral, and having it start at the bottom. I used thin cloisonne wires not the thicker wires I used on the last pair. Not sure why as I prefer the thicker wire...

It all worked beautifully on the first pair - but disaster struck as the first colour I used went cloudy after the second firing. There are two reasons this might have happened. 

1. I used recycled fine silver, and there may have been some solder or other impurity in the metal that reacted with the enamel.
2. Using Blue Gum glue to stick on the cloisonne wires. Although I doubt that as it would have affected all the colours, not just the pale blue I think...

What I should have done, and I just thought of it now, was to put some fine silver foil over the cloudy mess and it would have fixed it. What I DID do was continue as normal adding layers of the bad colour, thinking it may just sort it self out in the kiln. It didn't.

One day I might grind out that horrible mess and try and fix them, but here they are. Very nice apart from that bad colour right in the middle.

Pair #3

I was very careful not to use that colour on the second, smaller pair. 

I also enamelled and fired both earrings at the same time to save time and to make them a bit more similar to each other. All in all they worked out much better, my only complaint is that the colours are layed out a bit wrong - the pale blue is very similar in tone to the silver so the spiral is not very visible, and I should have thought about that.

Pair #4

Note to self - grind down the edges before enamelling in future!!!
(I did them after and things got a bit uneven.)

Here are all of this series so far, and a work in progress shot of one of the third pair, before the disaster.

Many hours of work!

If only that lovely middle colour hadn't spoilt...