An Early Morning Firing

Early in the morning is a great time to fire up the kiln for a long 9 hour firing. That's what I did yesterday after the Friday night class in Bronze clay. It was Diya and I and we created pieces one right after the other. Bronze Clay has small particles of bronze in an organic compound and when fired becomes pure bronze. All the organic stuff burns away. It's a fairly new product, much like the Precious Metal Clay that I use for my fine silver pieces. The bronze is beautiful and I must say that I wasn't too enthused about it in the beginning. But the more I work with it, the more I like it. Since the firing is such a long time, I like to have a full kiln load and it isn't very often that I work with it, so we use up the whole 100 gram package. I made a couple of "test" pieces among these. I wanted to see if PMC silver paste would adhere to the bronze during the firing. And, I also wanted to see if decorative balls would adhere, as well as a cubic zirconia gemstone. This is what we came up with.



Our pieces get put into the carbon standing up on its end...


Into the kiln it goes to be fired...


And, nine hours later, the firing is complete.


The result of my testing was that the PMC Silver did not adhere at all on the bronze, but the cubic zironia gemstone did make it through the firing and stayed on my pendant. I'll be finishing that up in a few days!

My featured jewelry piece is the shiny bronze "Peace" pendant laying on top of the just fired piece. I call it my "Peace" pendant because it resembles the Native American symbol of an arrow, with the head of it pointing inward. Very Cool!

I did my walk this morning...am eating my oatmeal to which I added some Cheerios...and I'll be working this afternoon at the House of Rice, where I'll get my ingredients for the next green tea cookies that I'll be baking this week. I'm having dinner with the family tonight. It's going to be a good, good day...