It is my hope that sometimes my blog entries offer ideas that spark your imagination or suggest some helpful technique. This IS NOT one of those entries!

I volunteered to guide a group of folks this week in making my dimensional bracelet. I say “guide” because I told myself that I was definitely not going to do any more teaching when I closed my consulting business. This is NOT teaching! At some point in my professional life, the dominant phrase was “guide on the side, not sage on the stage.”

Below is a photo of one of the dimensional bracelets. It is pictured with the necklace I made for a customer.

Since the bracelet armature requires relatively heavy wire, I gathered what we needed from the San Marcos Green Guy (recycling business). Later, realizing that I usually patina the bracelet after it is formed but before the stones go on, I decided to go ahead and patina the wire for the participants. We will not have enough time to stop and patina the armatures at our meet up. This seemed like the right thing to do, but when I looked at the amount of wire, it became obvious that it wasn’t going to fit into my little patina bowl.

I considered my options and added the condition that I didn’t want to use very much liver of sulphur which would be needed if I mixed a large patina batch for a bigger bowl. Therefore, I decided a plastic bag would work great. (My undergraduate students used to use small amount of food coloring in plastic bags to color the pasta we used with storyboards; so why wouldn’t it work for wire? )  Go ahead . . . why wouldn’t it? Look at the picture and you might get a clue.  Hint: The ends of the wire are sharp!

 

The bag worked great at first. I used a very small amount of liver of sulphur and water and was able to move it around in the bag to cover the wire a little at a time. Everything was going fine until I squeezed a bit too hard and one of the wires poked a hole in the bag. Then instead of patina in a bag, I had patina on the table, patina on the floor, patina on the shoes, etc. (I’m glad there wasn’t a dog wasn’t sitting at my feet!)  

Now, perhaps you will agree with my initial statement that this isn’t a very helpful blog entry. Surely no one else would try to put a sharp object in a plastic bag of patina. (If you, too, might have considered doing this, then my blog entry has been helpful after all!) It’s better to go ahead and mix that big batch of patina in that big bowl!