Thanks for the reply Kwant, I hadn't realised that - I was busy with the day job last month and not paying much attention to the forum.
It's a funny competition in a way - there were a few points while I was making my piece for this month where it occured to me that I could just superglue the thing together, for sake of the photos, and no one would ever know that it wasn't really wearable... But I resisted the temptation!
I'm going to enter anyway - mainly because I really want a rolling mill. And also because I think I had an interesting idea this month, but choose the wrong technique to create it, and I'd appreciate advice from the people who would have done it better.
I decided to use this month to try something I'd been thinking about for a while. I 'harvested' some long grasses, and coated them in 8 thick layers of metal clay paste. I fired them in the kiln, and then formed them into a braclet, soldering the blades together. This looked amazing, and I was tempted to take photos then, but it was far too fragile to actually wear. I strengthened some weak points with solder, but realised that it just wasn't going to work. So I added a strip of silver sheet in the middle, and soldered the metal clay to this. This added the strength that I needed, but it lost the delicate look that I loved - I wanted it to look like a single blade of grass wrapped around my wrist. I oxidised the piece, and then cleared most of it off, except in the deepest bits.
I like this idea, but in pracise, I think metal clay was the wrong thing to use. It took hours of very careful burnishing to shine and work harden this piece, and depite this, the finish isn't great. And there is no way that the clay would be strong enough to stand alone without additional silver. This might be because I didn't coat it thick enough - I've not used silver clay often. But I think that what I really wanted to do was use electro-forming? I've seen examples on this forum of people using that, and I think that's what I was trying to achieve. Or once I did an organic casting in a class, and that might have been suitable, if I'd coated the grass with something first?
Anyway, comments appreciated...
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