Congratulations to our latest Student of the Week-Ellen Jacobs

Here’s to Ellen Jacobs! This beautiful enamel is based on a famous painting. Do you recognize it? Ellen did such a wonderful job and the elegant frame setting she made really showcases her enamel. Our method here at JAI for enamel in gold is as follows.

We make our enameling cups out of fine silver since once set the cup will be invisible. When soldering the enamel cup down always put the solder outside the bezel and use only just enough to fill the seam. Any excess solder inside the cup can interfere with your enamel. This is not as crucial with opaques rather than transparents but sloppy habits always show somehow in the end. For the cloisonne wire, we use 1 dwt of fine or 24k gold. The color is amazingly rich and since 24k gold doesn’t oxidize at all you don’t run into issues with that. We melt our 1dwt into a small ingot and take it down on the square mill all the way to the smallest opening. Annealing isn’t necessary and in fact will make the cloisonne wire more difficult to work with. After our ingot is milled down to the smallest opening, we take it to the flat mill and mill it down to our desired thickness. In the case of a live subject (however stylized) we make what we call “nervous wire”. This is wire milled to .002 and then bent back and forth like an accordion with the fine tips of your tweezers. It is afterward pulled straight but it will maintain some movement in it’s line. This makes for a less static looking line and is more pleasing for flowers, animals and portraits. This is when the shaping of the cloisonne wire can begin. We will talk more later about the enameling process but take a moment to appreciate what fine work Ellen did. Enjoy!