Sword hilt courtesy of the divers and archeologists working on Queen Anne's Revenge ship recently found off the coast of NC

With the recent steep rise in prices of precious metal, has come another  neat idea: metal clay made up of the non-precious metals. They are real metals for art jewelry which could offer a gold color but not cost $1600 a troy ounce.  

Wow!  What a neat idea.  The cool silvery glint of sterling silver or platinum is much sought after, but many have always  intensely loved the way that warm colors of gold or copper.  Copper has always been used in jewelry, is certainly well-known for turning skin green, and conversely thought to be a healer of arthritis pain, but not since the time of the Romans have we seen much bronze jewelry.  

So, bronze in modern jewelry?  Do you have a foundry in your neighborhood to cast a form for a ring or a bracelet?  Cn you melt copper and tin in the correct ratio and pour this metal into a mold?   Do you have the strength to saw it or drill it or grind it?  Remember the Bronze Age?  Why do you think the armies who had bronze axes and helmets and breast plates were so often the winners in combat? It is REALLY hard. 

And then, why does copper jewelry turn your skin green, and why are bronze statues brown or green, not the golden color of new bronze?  Well, they all ”rust” or react with air or your skin.  Precious metals such as gold, platinum and fine or pure silver don’t react or combine.  They always stay shiny.

  What makes this soooo interesting is since copper, and bronze, steel, etc. all react with air to “rust”, and to make metal jewelry you have to use a lot of heat,  jewelry made of copper or bronze ends up looking pretty “rusted” from the outset. Kind of old and tired from the get go.   Sheet metal is soldered and annealed with intense heat, and all metal clay has to be heated at high temperatures for a long time in a kiln  just like pottery.  So what to do?

I first met Bill Struve because LaceyAnn, his wife,  and I were both in the same gallery run by the Wilmington Art Association.  I was exhibiting as a painter/mixed media person.  She had  jewelry on display made with silver metal clay.  This  silver in a new form, seemed so intriguing to me, that I as I retired, about two years after seeing the silver clay; I enrolled in college metals classes and became a metalsmith.  

So back to Bill Struve and his great inspiration.  Bill, who is a retired chemical engineer,  figured out that he could make a bronze clay (think famous statues or old Roman coins) and  fire it without much oxygen by totally surrounding the entire bronze metal clay  item in activated carbon.  In a container, full of activated carbon,  the bronze metal clay piece lies, fully protected from most oxygen and stays inside the activated charcoal for hours while the metal clay is sintering. This means that the metal particles are getting closer together.  The metal ends up about as dense and strong as cast metal. 

  He went on to make a copper clay, and Hadar Jacobson has taken this further by making several steel clays.   These clays are now producted by several companies, all over the world. 

 Here’s a cute story written by Celie Fago, about how she first met Bill and Lacey Ann and saw her first piece of bronze clay.  By the way,  Lacey Ann, who has always before made jewelry, has a piece in our  Cameron Art Museum, made of three or more different colors of dark bronze colored clay; that is, pottery type clay!
I guess she fell in love with the color and wanted to make something much bigger than her activated charcoal container would allow.

Thanks for making history, Bill!

We are circus people.
I’ve decided after reading Luann Udell’s funny blog on this topic that I’m definitely a circus person. When you really love making things, and your best friends think you are indeed quite strange, not at all normal, then you’ve probably arrived at exactly the right spot in the universe.
Luann says:
“Remember, to ordinary people, we are the people who ran away to join the circus.

Use the magic
We humans love the odd and the curious: (such as) The Guinness Book of Records, or the story in your local newspaper about the calf born with two heads or the gardener who grew a monster-sized squash; or even the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs TV program with Mike Rowe, who volunteers to try out the nation’s dirtiest, most disgusting work, and P.T. Barnum’s famous (or infamous) sideshow attractions.
The proverbial “man bites dog” (vs. the boring and predictable “dog bites man”) stories.
What’s at the root of all these?
Novelty.

I agree. We artists are considered passing strange by most. I find myself become an odd and highly unusual person. I used to look and act ordinary for my job as a nurse, but I’m not doing it any more.
Well, there are a few things I’m not doing. First, I’m not dyeing my hair a non-human color. Second, I can still clean up and look presentable, but at the same time laugh, with a knowing smile when a painter friend of mine and I were talking about how stained some of our everyday clothing are, and she began to talk about a spot of Cadmium Light Red on a pair of black pants that she just had to keep and wear because she so loved the look of that bright red against the dark background.
I sometimes appear to sing with my choir with metal clay stains all over my hands. I had washed them, so they were more or less germ free, but “darkened” with copper or bronze down in the print lines. Before leaving the house, I never noticed.
Oh well, we are wild and crazy artists.

Hello, World,

I’ve moved the guts of this site to another spot on the web, which means that I have to rebuild all my posts about metal, pirates and the seashore.  Stay tuned and have patience; although at this point maybe the person who needs to have patience is me!

Thanks, Beth