{"id":186,"date":"2012-08-09T19:08:58","date_gmt":"2012-08-09T19:08:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/?p=186"},"modified":"2014-07-20T17:10:56","modified_gmt":"2014-07-20T17:10:56","slug":"186","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/2012\/08\/09\/186\/","title":{"rendered":"Mokume"},"content":{"rendered":"

This month Rio Grande, one of my favorite jewelry suppliers, posed the question, “What’s on your workbench this month?” Since the best answer wins a prize, I thought I’d give it a try. Here’s my entry:<\/p>\n

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I like to have a bunch of projects going at once, but the thing I am most focused on this month is using mokume as a writing surface.<\/p>\n

This picture is a sample for a set of rings I am making. The mokume was prepared by soldering sheets of copper and silver together then annealed and rolled many times until the layers were laminated together.<\/p>\n

I have a beautiful rolling mill that I got many years ago from Rio Grande. I call him Durston. I always protect his rollers with cardboard, which makes for some interesting paper scraps.<\/p>\n

After rolling I used a chasing tool with a chiseled edge to form letters in the sheet. I had to reverse the letters so that they would appear the right way on the face of the piece.<\/p>\n

Initially I was thinking about using letter stamps, but they weren’t making a crisp enough outline. Also, not every letter can be reversed.<\/p>\n

After the letters were bumped out on the mokume, the fun of revealing them began. I used a small flat file to begin with, then switched to a square one.<\/p>\n

It didn’t look like much until I took my torch to it. Then the colors popped! I love techniques like this, when you see your results for the first time, it’s like Christmas morning.<\/p>\n

This piece of mokume is going to be made into a ring. The letters U and R will be stamped onto other pieces of metal and then those will be soldered onto the ring. When it is complete it will read, “U R mine.”<\/p>\n

There are going to be two versions of this ring. One is as described above and the other is a set of two rings attached with a small chain with U R on one ring and Mine on the other.<\/p>\n

I didn’t win the contest \ud83d\ude41\u00a0 but I have continued working on my new technique. Neither of these rings can be worn on the finger, there is really too much exposed copper. However, they can be suspended from a chain like a charm.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This month Rio Grande, one of my favorite jewelry suppliers, posed the question, “What’s on your workbench this month?” Since the best answer wins a prize, I thought I’d give it a try. Here’s my entry: I like to have a bunch of projects going at once, but the thing I am most focused on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-metal-experiments"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":467,"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions\/467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ellenmetal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}