Friday 24 February 2012

A steep learning curve....

It's been on of those weeks! I've been contemplating, sketching and generally tiddling about with a commission from one of my favourite customers for a few months now, on and off of course. Harriet, my old tutor, suggested I try a technique called Keum-boo, which is Korean, and is a method of attaching pure gold leaf to silver. It's a strangely simple technique, but there are lots of individual steps, and missing one, or not doing it properly can result in a complete failure. Also, it is really difficult to find out much beyond the absolute basics of the process, and by the end of day one I had at least a dozen questions that weren't being answered by the few pages I'd found in my extensive collection of jewellery technique books. And more than a few unsuccessful attempts...




Luckily I have a friend who I was at college with, who was on hand to have her brain picked. And there's YouTube! Between the two of them, Day Two was rather more successful.




My customer came in today to take a peak at the testers and all systems are go for the final cuff. Gulp. One large hunk of silver, and only a few skinny test pieces to feel confident about. Double gulp. So Monday I will start again - a few more sample pieces I think for some jewellery Dutch courage and then I will have to go for it. Won't I? Sigh....

2 comments:

Janice Ashworth said...

looks amazing. Am looking forward to seeing the final results x

Flotsam said...

This looks good already. I am sure your work will be worth the effort and look forward to seeing how it turns out.