A couple of months ago I ran into a (yet another) temporary roadblock while fabricating a pendant/necklace for an ex-colleague back in France. Which led me to conduct some experiments to try and go straight through said roadblock instead of detouring. Well, long story short, some of those experiments didn't work and I oxidized my jump rings.
BUT ... along the way, I enriched my mind and tested my patience and was jazzed to find this patina develop after my 2nd try. I used scrap sheet copper to experiment with but I will surely be incorporating those two heart halves into a future piece.
 |
| Copper Patina using Ammonia & Pine Bark |
After unsuccessfully trying a Vinegar/Salt Potato Chip recipe for patina on copper, I kept researching and found one on this blog using Ammonia with bits of other things from nature to imprint the patina onto the copper. Scrolling down, the Moistened method caught my eye and cat-lover that I am, saw that she used kitty litter to achieve the effect that I wanted. Alas, my sister (my home-away-from-home at the moment) has a dog, so I scrounged around the yard and picked up some bark, dried leaves, pebbles and twigs. Rolled it all in some gauze, rubber banded it and moistened with ammonia. Placed it all in a zip lock bag and armed myself with patience.
Two weeks of patience, as you see by the dates on the bag. The jump rings didn't take the patina and they were my initial reason for doing all this experimentation. So I removed them after one week along with the bark and some other odds & ends. My final unwrapping revealed the beautiful colors you see above.
I also mentioned above a potato chip patina experiment. My lovely neice had finished the Vinegar/Sea Salt chips so I poured the end of a bag of regular chips into a plastic container, added white vinegar and waited a day or two.
I wanted to camouflage the solder join on the jump rings which, in spite of using a well-known brand of Copper/Phosphorus Solder, came out a dull silver color. NOT what you want on Copper! I concede now (after even more research) that I may have contributed to that unknowingly.
Well, whatever the cause I wanted these to be a beautiful patinaed blue-green and I didn't get that color. What I got was this:
So I just dropped 'em in some LOS (Liver of Sulfur) for a couple of minutes and they turned black. Now to sand, file and see if that nasty solder join will finally fade into the finish. Then I'll complete this piece and off to France it will go... much to the delight of my unsuspecting ex-colleague 😺
A.
Comments
Post a Comment