Poinsettia Champlevé Pendant
Glass enamel. Tried it, liked it. Then I moved to other things.
Trying to think of a cool Christmas thyme project, the thought of colored glass enamel came to mind. Of course! Color is what is needed and missing in my silver work. I use a bit of black silver oxide on many of my pieces for definition. But there is a universe of color available.
The process in this project is called champlevé. I don’t carve the troughs for the color but rather use a lost wax silver casting with the recesses designed into the casting.
The vitreous enamel pundits say glass enamel can’t be done with Sterling silver (because of the copper) but as can be seen, it’s all just knowing how.
The process is to pickle the silver and create a barrier layer of pure silver on the surface. I may explain the process in some future post. It’s not magic, just a technique.
There is a similar process to champlevé called basse-taille. The difference is basse-taille used transparent enamel so features and designs under the enamel can be seen. That will be on my agenda for some future project.
This is a Christmas season pendant, so I picked a poinsettia blossom as my subject. I found a general outline drawing of a poinsettia so I would get the shape correct. It was not in a useable format for designing a Champlevé but got me started in my own design.
The pendant was created in Vectric Aspire (V10) as I am very comfortable with designing with this software.
Since Aspire can output .stl files, after I completed the design, I used one of my 3D printers to create a plastic prototype. The real output was to a g-code file for my Taig CNC mill.
I have one of my Taig mills dedicated to carving wax. I modified this mill by adding a 20.000 rpm water cooled spindle and a fourth axis (A) for rotary milling projects. (jewelry rings).
I machined two wax masters of the poinsettia pendant design and cast them in sterling silver using the lost wax casting method.
The resultant casting was cleaned and prepped for the champlevé process. Four firings (layers) were required to fill the recesses.
After the enameling was complete, the silver was again brought up to a full mirror like finish, through several stages of polishing.
Last step was the addition of the bails.
I think they look quite good and now I am planning to make a few more duplicates, then move on to other glass enameling projects.