Tuesday 26 January 2010

Inspiration from Joy Funnell

I wanted to say a big thank you to jewellery designer and teacher Joy Funnell who helped me out last week in getting hold of some urgently needed 7gm packs of clay. If you haven't seen Joy's blog then you really need to. She's a metal clay artisan extraordinaire and all round genius!

Looking at the examples of Joy's work really brightened up my day and I was amazed at her skill and the sheer beauty of her work. Please, please, please take a look at Joy's moonlit sea pendant on the blog and you'll be astounded at what can be achieved with liver of sulhpur. Here are a few tips from Joy about resourceful ways of getting more colour from liver of sulphur.

"You can mix your LOS with hot coffee instead of hot water. This brings up some really nice colours. Using Cola instead seems to work as well. Try putting your piece into clear hot water to stop the action instead of cold. Hot water tends to being up more in the red range. If you are patinating earrings bend a wire so it will hold both at once and dip together to get similar colours on each one."

Thank you for some great advice Joy, I shall be reading your blog avidly in future.

2 comments:

  1. Does anyone have any suggestions for bringing out greens when using LOS?

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  2. Thanks Natalia, you are welcome.

    Greens can be a bit tricky in LOS as they come just before you get to black so you need to stop in time. Try rinsing the piece to stop the colour change in cold water with ice cubes added. That sometimes helps bring up greens and golds.

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