First Attempt at Cloisonne on Silver

Sadly lockdown is looming and my enamel classes have cancelled for the time being.
This means I will have to continue working on my own,

I saw a tweet a couple of days ago that caught my attention. It said:

You'll never be good at anything if you're not willing to be bad at it first. 

This is very true - so I'm taking this to heart and giving myself permission to make mistakes and ugly pieces. I will still hopefully learn something in the process.

Cloisonne isn't really my thing, but I wanted to try - it involves making cells from very thin wire, then filling the cells with enamel. 

This piece is 2cm in diameter and I have used two different wires,  thicker and thinner.

The colours are orange, hematite and yellow. Fired at 810C.

I have learned from this that the design was wrong - it was near impossible to get enamel into the tiny triangle spaces at the the bottom of the yellow circles. I should have made the circles smaller and left more space around them.

Also - orange is very dark in three layers but yellow is better.
I'll try and take another photo in the winter morning light tomorrow. 

Here is a close up of the piece, on the tip of my finger (it's not a big piece).

There is some cracking in the red (orange), not sure why that is.