Cool Tools: Basse-taille Enamel Necklace by Pam East

hi I'm Pam East and today I'm going to show you how to make a best time necklace bass tie is a form of enameling where you put the enamel over a texture completely covering the texture but you can see it really clearly through the enamel you're going to love this it's a lot of fun so let's go ahead and get started alright I'm going to get out some clay and this should be plenty right here and I'm going to roll it on the texture I like to do a pre roll on it so I'm going to roll it out to six cards thick and I get a better impression on my texture if it's flat when I put it on the on the texture so let's go ahead and do that alright alright so now I'm going to stack up some flats here and to create a height that is the same as my texture so it's exactly the same height and then I'm going to add a three card thickness on top of that because that's going to make my finished piece three cards thick it's really important on enameling that the clay be an absolute even thickness if there's differences in thickness then you're going to get cracks in your enamel so that's to be avoided I've already put some release agent on the stamp and don't miss that step or you'll spend a very unhappy 20 minutes picking clay out of your stamp and now I'm just going to give this a very firm up and back and there we go take that off and a voila that is a beautiful texture I love this texture this is circa stop reverse it's rapidly becoming one of my favorites and now I'm going to take a template to cut out my jewelry shape and I just like to look around and find the the part of this that I like the best I think I'm going to make that a little smaller there we go and that looks pretty good now when I cut this out I'm going to leave a gap at the top and the bottom I'm not going to cut through right at the top and right at the bottom because I'm going to be adding an extension for the bail and a little drop pearl that I'm going to put on this piece so here we go just going to go around and I'm going to stop and I'm going to go around and I'm going to stop and so you can see that it's still got connection here and here and now I'm going to use this bail template and it's got all different kinds of shapes that you can use to create bails and I'm going to put this right at the top and cut out around that and I'm going to put it right at the bottom and there I have the shape nicely cut out and it's got these little extensions top and bottom where I'm going to put the bail and the Pearl drop later on in this process and the one last thing I have to do here is punch a hole in the for the bail and for the Pearl so I'm going to just do that right here and I love this little clay punch another one of my favorite new tools and then the last thing I'm going to do is I am going to give it a very shallow dome so repeal it off of this and this is this is a closet light I cut the light off because they stack better that way but this is just a closet light and it's an extremely shallow dome I don't want it super dome I just want it to have a very light doming that's going to make my enamel work out a little better and then we're just going to let that dry and then we'll be ready for the next step pieces out of the dryer let's go ahead and add the sidewalls so I'm going to use a syringe I'll start by slightly dampening the surface where I'm going to attach the syringe it will stick better if it's a little bit damp I don't want it massively wet just just a little sticky there we go that should be plenty and then I'm going to use a syringe with a green tip and I'm just going to lay a line of syringe around the edge so here we go and remember that when you're using a syringe I want to show you here you don't need to be in a rush it's it's you don't have to be right on the surface in fact it won't come out well if you're right on the surface you want to be above the surface and just lay it down and time to do that so move don't be too rushed move purposefully as you do this and you want to lay it right along the edge and don't worry if you don't get it exactly perfect because you're going to have time to adjust it a little bit after it's on here notice that I'm leaving the extensions with the holes outside of this sidewall that I'm building for the enamel and that's what I want all right and I just going to touch that down to finish it off and that's not perfect you know over on this side here it's not all the way to the edge and that's okay I can just take a damp brush first of all I'm going to blend that theme just a little bit and then I'm going to just push it now one thing you'll notice a lot is that I use the water and a sponge it's really important to keep the right amount of water in your brush if your syringe work sticks to your brush your brush is too dry and if you get a pool of water on your work your brush is too wet you know you just want they're just the exact right amount of water in your brush so that you can manipulate the syringe without picking it up or soaking your piece and I'm going to turn this get the other side a little bit and I'm just positioning that right along the edge there we go so there it is with the sidewall and then I'm going to dry that and when that's dry I'm going to do some fill work alright the syringe is dry now we need to do some fill work to make that sidewall look like a solid piece I'm going to come back with a syringe and again I want to dampen this a little bit it always works a little better if it's damp so I'm just going to come around with this sponge tip applicator and damp it down a little bit sticky not wet so don't soak it and I'm going to lay some syringe now this time I don't have to be so precise I'm going to be pushing it in so I can be right on the surface and I am actually trying to fill that seam between the top and the bottom so you can see I put a very generous amount on there and I'm going to work it in sections I'm not going to try and do the whole thing all at once and you need a flat brush and I'm going to use the flat of the brush not the tip to Pat it into that seam and then I'll use a little water to smooth it and you can see I've just made a solid sidewall I'm going to do that all the way around and I'll dry that and then I'm going to do the inside as well and to do that I need to switch out and instead of using a green tip I'm going to use a pink tip because it's not a very big space and I'm just going to force a little material right into that crevice this is very important because what you don't want is for the enamel to undercut the syringe work if it does one of two things is going to happen you're either your syringe work is going to lift or your enamel is going to crack or maybe even both so again I'm going to use this flat brush as comes this brush is a it's called a bright number four and it's a squared off flat brush comes to a very sharp point and what I can do is push the material down into that crevice and then I'm going to use the flat of the brush we get this at an angle you can see to keep the sidewall inner sidewall perpendicular to the base I want it straight up and down I don't want it undercut I also don't want any kind of a slope if I have a sloped edge I might get cracks in my enamel so I'm using this flat brush to create a nice crisp inner edge and again I'm going to do that all the way around if I get a little syringe into my design I just brush it out there we go I'm going to do that all the way around we're going to dry it then we'll do our final finish work and it'll be ready to fire okay it's all dry and out of the dehydrator and now I'm going to do my green we're finishing and just get it ready and perfect for firing so I'll want to sand and smooth the edges and I just use some little sanding Pepsi's or micro mesh sanding pads I really like these and I'm going to just smooth around the outside and I'll go all the way around with this make sure that there's nothing rough be careful around the extensions you'll want to hold it very close to where you're sanding so that you don't break it off they are delicate little things and just be cautious with it and then once I get that done I'll want to do some work on the inside and for that I'm going to use some little files you can clean up the holes and make them a little a little bigger if necessary and just make sure that they're not rough and then you're going to also want to go along this inner wall and remember I said that it needed to be straight up and down it needs to be a perpendicular to the base so anywhere I ended up with a little clay going at an angle I'm going to go around with the file and just clean it up and so I'm going to make it nice and straight and that's going to make my enamels just perfect and you know I'll go through that and I'll dust it out a little bit I'll just I don't have a dry dusting brush on me so I'll just use this brush and then the last thing I do is I just smooth it all out with a little water and a sponge tip applicator so it's a really nice smoothing tool it'll get rid of any file marks if you flattened an area with the sanding sponges you can smooth that out as well and you can also get these little tiny ones this is a an eye liner a disposable eye liner brush and I can go around that inside and get just right in there and just smoothing I'm not really re I'm just smoothing away any file marks all right once that's done it's ready to fire just fire your piece at your normal high and firing schedule for whatever brand of metal clay that you use silver clay this is by the way 0.999 you do want to be using 0.999 silver clay for this project and use your regular firing schedule and when it's done tumble it for two hours and then we will be ready to start enameling it alright my piece is out of the tumbler and it is ready to be prepared for enameling and the important thing here is that the water cannot beat up I am I hope you can see that the water is beating up on the back of this if the water beads up your enamel is not going to stick very well so what we have to do is we have to clean it with ammonia and a little scrubby and I've got some ammonia over here this is a mixture about two-thirds ammonia one-third water and I'm going to scrub it with this scotch brite and so I'm roughing the surface a little bit and I'm also cleaning it off with the ammonia which is going to take off any soaps that might be left from your tumbler and it's going to get rid of any finger oils anything that might inhibit the enamel from sticking to the back ear Pease and also to the front of your piece I'm going to do both sides hold on so I've got this scrubbed and now what should happen when I dip it in the water is the water should sheet on here rather than beat up and okay so it's it's mostly sheeting but on this one side it's still beating so I'm going to go ahead and make sure I get that and now let's see if we get it sheeting okay so there we go the water is mostly sheeting on there all right there we go all right so I've got that side done and now I'm going to take a glass brush I'm not going to use the scrubber on the front side because it doesn't really get down into the texture so I'm going to use a glass brush to clean this side and it's the same thing I need to get off all the soaps any oils anything that's going to inhibit the enamel from sticking to the piece and get that cleaned up rinse it real good and dry it and don't put your fingers back on the surfaces that you're going to enamel at this point you should be holding it from the edges and there we go and now we're going to prep our enamels and then we'll start an Emily we're going to go ahead and prep the enamels now enamels contain very fine particles that will cause your enamel to be cloudy if we want to be able to see that texture really clearly through the enamel we have to size the enamel we have to remove the fines get rid of some of the larger particles and make a nice tight pack with small particle enamel we're going to do this by screening it and I have some screens here this is a 325 mesh screen and I'm going to push it into this pan put 1/4 on top and then I'm going to take a 150 mesh screen and put that on top of that toss that in there and before I go any further I'm going to put on a dust mask enamel its screening enamel puts a a lot of enamel glass dust in the air and you do not want to breathe that so it's very important to wear a mask that gives you a full seal around your nose and mouth when you're screening enamels so here we go this is there's no elegant way to put on a mask okay there we go and it's got a little metal piece that you can pinch over your nose to help keep any air from coming in around the outside of the mask so now that I've got that on there I'm going to take before I start I want to take my little custard this is Akademik cup that I put my enamels in you can also use plastic spoons but I really like the condiment cups because I can cap them and save them this way I'm going to write the color number on the side of the container it's really hard to write this where you can see it but I'm doing my best and this is water blue do write whether you write it on the handle of a spoon or the side of a condiment cup you need to do this because you will forget which color is which I've already screened a couple here but I'm going to do the water blue now pour that in there and I'm going to cap it and the reason I cap it is to prevent a lot of glass dust from going up into the air while I screen it I still need to wear a mask because when I take that cap off glass dust is going to come out now we're going to do the enamel dance right we're going to shimmy and shake go around and round back and forth turn it it only takes about 15 or 20 seconds to do this really those quarters push it through and it goes through pretty quickly okay so here we go what we have on top is 150 mesh enamel which is a little coarse for what we want to do we want a finer enamel so I'm going to put this back in the jar it's perfectly good enamel there's nothing wrong with it I can use it for another project and it's a little easier to get in the back in the jar if you use a little paper funnel of some kind there we go and then I'm going to take the next screen now this has everything that went through a 150 mesh screen but did not go through a 325 mesh screen and this is what we're going to use in our project it's going to pack really tight we're not going to get bubbles and we're going to have a nice clear result so I'll take the quarter out pour it into my little paper funnel and I'm going to put it into the little cup that I prepared cap that set it aside and what I'm left with is the fines these are the fines that cause enamel to be cloudy I just throw it away there's there's not really that much that you want to be doing with it it doesn't even make good counter enamel so I just get rid of it and that is how we prepare the enamels whenever you enamel a piece you need to put enamel on both sides enamel exerts force on metal and causes it to warp which will put cracks in your enamel so we equalize that force by doing both sides I'm going to do the counter enamel right now and what I have here is some clear fire clear fire is an enamel adhesive and I'm going to just smear some of this on to the back of this piece and I bring pretty generous with it I mean it's not dipped in it but it's pretty generous and it is still going to want to pool down in the middle of this but I have a way of dealing with that I'm going to put some enamel into this sifter and now the sifter don't fill up more than a third full or it won't work quite right and it's got a twisted handle which is going to allow me to sift this out by running my finger nail up and down the enamel comes sifting out and start from the edges if I start from the edges it'll pull the enamel that pooled in the middle out and you'll end up getting an even sift over the entire back I'm wearing a glove because I want I need to be able to tilt and tilt this to get the enamel on evenly but I don't want me to put my finger prints on the front of the piece that I so carefully cleaned earlier and there we go I've got a nice coating of enamel on the back of the piece and it's even and then I'm going to take this and kind of look at it make sure it's not all over the place and then I'm going to set it in a trivet and I will be putting this trivet with the firing rack into the kiln to fire the piece that's going to fire at 1450 for about two two and a half minutes to fuse and I'll come back when that's done alright now we're finally ready for what I consider the fun part and that's applying the enamels here is the counter enamel all fired and now I'm going to turn the piece over so we can work on the front and then we have to wet our enamels before we use them we're going to be doing a wet pack technique and I've already wet two of them but I'm going to show you what I'm going to do with with this third one I have two cups here and they're marked clean and waste and I nothing ever goes into the clean water you want to keep your your clean water clean don't rinse your brushes in it don't ever put anything in there and this is distilled water you only want to use distilled water with your enamels so I'm going to go ahead and pour some into this enamel I'm using a generous amount and I'm going to just set that aside and then I'm going to agitate it a little bit with the enamel spatula I'm going to stir it up make sure the enamel is well saturated and this is also going to rinse any remaining fines off of the grains of enamel so you can see it got a little cloudy and that's normal now let it set for sell just a little bit and then I'm going to pour that off okay and that's now ready to use and I'll move that out of my way and pull these in so I can actually see them and we're going to start laying in the enamel all right so I'm ready to start applying my enamel so I'm going to wet my brush this is just water it's just clean distilled water there is no clear fire in it when I'm doing wet packing I don't need the clear fire so just start by wetting your brush and I'm going to start with the darkest color which is the the water blue I'm going to put that where I can get to it easily and I'm going to start picking it up now water is your friend if you'll find that if you don't if it doesn't lay down well on your piece it's because you don't have enough water in your enamel now I just tipped it up on the lid I'm having a little bit of an angle that's going to help me pick up this enamel and I'm going to use a scribe to push the enamel off onto the piece and I'm going to just start laying this in and I want to work in very thin layers I'm going to do multiple layers quite thin because if you put it in too thickly you're going to get bubbles in your enamel also we're going to be doing a shading technique so I if I do very thick layers I don't leave myself enough room to shade and so here we go getting this in and you can see I'm working with very small bits of enamel I'm not laying in Jake gigantic amounts I'm going to be blending this with three colors I'll be used I'm using water blue aqua blue and Cascade blue and enamel does not mix like paint it mixes like a bowl of marbles so if I mix red and yellow marbles together I do not at orange marbles I get spots of red and yellow and the same thing happens with the enamels so I'm going to go ahead and start in with the the next color and I'm going right up against it and I've got to blend it and the way I'm going to get it to blend smoothly and not look like little specks is through the layering by the way I overlap the colors determines how the shading turns out I'm going to just come up just a little bit around here I'm designing this so that it's very light here and goes darker as it moves across I'm taking advantage of this pattern this is that circa stop reverse that I really love and then I'm going to switch to the Cascade here we go this is a very light blue these are gorgeous just yummy yummy blues and you can see this is very thin they this so the pattern is sticking up through the enamel that's okay I'm going to do more layers so now I don't want a sharp dividing line so you can see that there's this sharp dividing line between the colors and I don't want that so I'm going to use my scribe and I am going to blend the two colors together right where they come together so that I can obscure that line if you get a sharp line in your enamel I don't care how much shading you do it's going to show so once I blend it I'm going to tap it with this with the handle of my scribe and what that's doing is its settling the enamel and allowing the water to come to the surface so that I can wick off the excess moisture so let me just do that really quick and I use toilet paper for wicking it's what I found works the best so I'm just going to get the excess more moisture I just do it from the edges normally it wicks in one shot but with all these little channels I have to go around the edges okay so now the water has been whipped out I'm going to take my brush and I'm going to go around make sure that there's no enamel up on this rim I don't really want to have to do a lot of grinding on this after its fired so make sure that you take the time before you fire it to clean it off and this is ready for the first firing you need to set it on top of the kiln let it dry for about five minutes before you put it in the kiln you don't want to put something that's really wet and straight into the kiln that the water boils it can blow holes in the enamel fire it at 1,400 that's 50 degrees less than I said for that counter enamel I want you to slow down now I want you to fire at 1400 for two two-and-a-half minutes and then after that we'll be ready to lay in the second layer of enamel and I'll talk a little more about shading okay here it is all fired and you can see the enamel is nice and transparent we're going to be doing that shading technique I talked about and the way that works is I'm going to start laying in my dark blue but I'm not going to go up as far as I did the first time and it's the lighter layers overlapping the darker layers that creates that graduated shading and prevents you from getting that bowl of marbles look so I'm coming up but I'm not coming up as far as I did the first time and now I'm going to switch to that aqua and the Aqua is going to overlap a little bit of that water blue and I'm leaving a little of the aqua from the first firing exposed so that I can also overlap the cat with the Cascade and I'm not going to come around that corner like I did the first time alright so there is the aqua and now I'm going to grab that cascade blue and I'm going to start laying that in and now this is overlapping where the Aqua was and you're seeing one color through the other and that's what creates that nice gentle shading from light to dark this is what we want to see and all of the colors will get darker as we add subsequent layers so they might look very pale much paler than you expect after the first firing but as you go along they will get deeper and deeper and deeper and I just need a tiny bit more water blue right there and now I'm going to blend the colors where they come together just like I did before no sharp lines and then I'm going to tap it like I did before to settle those enamels and then I'm going to wick it now I want to see if we can make this they can really see the wicking you can see that water coming up out of the piece there you go did you see it it just went right across and that is ready to fire I'm going to dry that on top of the kiln for about five minutes and then I'm going to fire it at 1,400 for about two to two-and-a-half minutes and then we'll evaluate whether it needs another layer or not okay here is the second layer fired and you can see that that blending is starting to happen now and I think it needs like one more layer and it's going to be done at this point what I'll do is I'm going to eliminate the water blue I'm going to just start right in with the Aqua and I'll have that coming all the way down to the bottom and the Cascade blue is going to come out much further and this is going to again increase the amount of graduation on the shading I want to get all of this little silver detail covered with enamel but I don't want to come all the way to the top of the sidewall I want to leave it in set just a little bit and how many layers that takes is going to vary depending upon how thin you major layers and how high you major sidewall so I can't say it's going to take this many layers or that many layers it's going to be at least two you can't get any shading unless you do at least two it might be four it varies from project to project I'm going to go ahead and lay in and fire that third layer and then I'm going to come back and show you the finishing third layer of enamel fired and that's it's done I really like the way it looks I've got good shading and good color and I'm ready to do the finish work if I have any enamel up on the silver part and I do in places I want to grind that off now whenever you're doing any grinding or sanding on enamels you want to work wet if you work dry on enamels you run the risk of cracking your enamels so I'm going to use this this is a sanding stick a tropical shine sanding stick it is 220 grit and 320 the higher grit is on the printed side so I'm going to start with the 220 which is the back side and I'm going to just grind off any little bits of enamel that got out onto the silver portion and I'll go back into the water frequently because I really do want to keep this wet and in fact even when I don't have an Amal I still do all of my sanding wet because water X is a lubricant and it makes your sanding go a lot quicker so here we go and then also if you got any little trivet marks on the back don't worry about it this will take that off as well I can just go around the edges and take any little trivet marks off that's pretty normal to get those and once I get the enamel off and I'm just looking now to see if I've got all the enamel off once I've got all of the enamel off now I'm going to flip this over and go to the higher grit because I want to polish this edge I want to make it mirror finish and polishing is just a series of more and more refined scratches I want all of the 220 grit scratches to be taken out with the 320 grit and I'm going to kind of go in one direction at this point alright so now I've got that done and at that point I'm going to switch to the pink one this is 400 600 get grit and again the the finer side is the printers printed side so I'll start with the unprinted side and that's the 400 grit all right so I've gone all the way around with the 400 grit and now I'm going to turn it over and I'm going to start in with a 600 grit we're just polishing this up all right at this point I'm going to switch to these micromesh sanding pads because this is going to give me that fine mirror shine and I don't need all of these I usually start with the wine color and I'll be able to use like every other one I don't it three of these is going to bring it to a nice high shine and these could be used wet as well doesn't hurt them and you can see it starting to really shine up and look like silver so why would I want it's getting exciting I'm going to jump down to the the teal all right and then the last one I'll use is the Navy and this is this is one it just really starts to pop I mean look at that it's absolutely beautiful all right I've got this really buffed up nicely and looking like silver and we're ready to dry it off and assemble the piece of jewelry I've finished with most of the polishing the last thing I'm going to do is buff it with a little polishing cloth just to give it that last little bit of mirror shine and these little blue polishing cloths work great look at that Wow I love mirror finish all right so once I get this buffed up I'm going to go ahead and assemble it and I'm going to be putting a little pearl at the bottom and a bail at the top now what I have here is a half drilled pearl and I'm going to be putting a little pearl stem on it I'm not going to actually demonstrate this I've got one that's already glued up I just wanted you to see what the parts look like and you find this little hole that's on here and this tucks right in and you just use a little epoxy to fix it into place and you can use a flush cutter to trim the peg if it's too long so like when I push it in here it doesn't go all the way down I would just trim a little off and fix it in that way so once you've got that glued then it's just assembling and I'm going to start with the little pearl so I've got some three millimeter jump rings these are 18 gauge 3 millimeter jump rings I really like using the heavier gauge jump rings because they hold together really well and then I'm just going to take my little pearl and I'm going to slide that on there so I've got both those pieces on there I'll take and I use two pairs of pliers to do jump rings just work those two ends together and I want those two ends tightly together so it doesn't fall apart and there's the purl on the end of this and now I'm going to do the same thing with the bail - plier method now slide that on there oh this has a little sterling mark on it somewhere I want to make sure that that's at the back okay I'm going to put those together and there it is we've got the finished pen do put that on chain and off you go if you want to learn more about enameling on metal clay and go a little more in depth check out my videos each video has three full projects and they go much more detail step-by-step I think you'll really enjoy them I hope you've really enjoyed doing this project I've got other projects coming soon thanks for joining me visit our Learning Center at cool tools at us for more cool jewelry making videos subscribe to our YouTube channel like us on facebook follow us on twitter and be sure to sign up for our email list to be the first to hear about new videos new products and other cool stuff from cool tools you

Channel: CoolToolsVideos

Views: 124,726

Rating: 4.9171534 out of 5

Keywords: pam east, pameast, enamel, enamelling, enamaling, basse taille, silver metal clay, fine silver, how to, instruction, diy, demonstration, jewerly, artist, kiln fire, basse, taile, enamalist, pendant, necklace

Id: 9cup7AEHrBI

Length: 40min 11sec (2411 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 19 2016