Spiral Earrings Pairs Five and Six

 Ok - I think I'm done with this exercise for the moment... 

With these two pairs I decided to try and rectify the obvious colour mistake from pair #4 - and made the spiral more visible with the enamel colour choices and blending. 

Pair Five - 
I started out with dark blue, and ended up with a different dark blue. The second dark blue wasn't meant to be quite as dark, but it turned out nearly identical to the blue in the middle of the spiral.
Not terrible but not quite the look I was after.

Technically they came out OK, no serious issues, I even ground out a speck of dust with a diamond drill bit, filled it back in with enamel and re-fired - seemed to work fine. 

Probably my best attempt to date

Pair Six:

Finally got the colour scheme I was after.
'But there is no pair - there is only one!' I hear you say. 
Well - on the final 'fire polish' firing - the enamel popped off the second earring. 
It didn't exactly pop off - more like it peeled away from the edges and blobbed in the middle of the cloisonnes.

I suspect I ground the enamel down too thin. Can't think of a different explanation. 

Obviously I was very disappointed, because otherwise it had seemed to go well. 

I will be more careful in future and not grind so enthusiastically.

Pair Six in progress

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What I have learned so far from making all these earrings:

1. Enamelling is very labour intensive.
2. There are no shortcuts. 
3. You have to do things in the correct order.
4. Keep workspace clean and tidy. 
5. Improvising only works sometimes.
6. Keep notes - you won't remember which colours you used if you don't write things down.

Cloisonne is good for practicing because it is direct - you don't need to plan that much in advance (as in etch the silver first for basse-taille for example) so I will probably continue but I'll probably do different designs next week.

Nice blob of molten fine silver