In yesterday’s post, I wrote Part One of Willa’s Journey. Here is part two…
Now for the making of Willa’s Journey, the pendant (of course, it wasn’t named that yet!). Inspiration started with a small group of three precious, beautiful torch-enameled disks. I loved them, and knew they were good. These have been on my workbench every day for months, looking at me. Waiting for inspiration. One disk set in silver would be just fine, seeing as each disk took me several hours to make – torch firing isn’t like regular enameling. Each layer is sifted on and fired in the flame individually. You cannot fire a large grouping at once using this method. The beauty of it is that you get to see the ground glass melt before your eyes, and the artist has a bit of control as to how far to push it. I lost count as to the number of firings in the disk that I used for Willa’s Journey, but I would guess at least ten trips to the torch.
Then I was lucky enough to receive from another artist a box of brass clock parts – these are precision clock guts made in Germany. One small little thing might be wrong with the clock, but the whole gearbox would be replaced rather than waste time repairing it. Goodie – rescuing beauty and precision from the dumpster! So one day I spent a few hours taking apart a gear box, smashing my thumb in the process, and spread the gears before me on the workbench…and glanced over at the disks. While my thumb throbbed I picked up a disk, and set it on a gear…and I was off! These disparate pieces were just waiting for one another.
Please read more in tomorrow’s post.