Enamelling again

When I first started this blog I thought the main focus of my work was enamelling.  Over the past year, (ironically while I have been Chair of the Guild of Enamellers) I hardly seem to have done any enamelling at all.  I have recently done some testing and made samples ready for the Introduction to Enamelling workshop at the Flame Off 2010 at Towcester Racecourse.  Today I enamelled a piece I have been working on sporadically for a couple of weeks.  Having finished it I am not sure I like it.  It does look better on the finger and the oxidisation has produced more variety and subtlety of colours than the photograph shows.  I used textures embossed into watercolour paper to make the background textures on the art clay silver.  Added fine silver wires and tiny balls using overlay silver paste, soldered the two shells to the sterling ring band, enamelled it and then riveted the dyed pearls into place.

Direction of travel, Ring 1

This is one of my Inspired by Heritage pieces.  It is a ring and is called 'Direction of Travel' and based on ideas about Captain Scoresby Junior.  He was captain of a whaling ship and did many experiments relating to magnetism with the aim of improving ships compasses.  This is the same Captain Scoresby who did the beautiful drawings of snowflakes that I used for inspiration for earlier work.

This ring is also trying to capture ideas about essentials of life and finding the way home again.  It has a tiny working compass embedded in resin together with bits of red thread.  The compass did originally say 'water proof' but I sanded the 'proof' bit away just leaving the words water and compass before I embedded it.  The compass actually shows up more clearly in this photograph than it does really.