Back to the Beginning

Last week, my friend Carol Scheftic was blogging about tumblers and polishing metal clay.  Burnish means to polish by rubbing.   She mentions that early on she used silverware to burnish her metal clay pieces.  We've all been creative in the tool department when we are trying to save money to buy clay.

Usually I burnish fired pieces to give the raised areas a high shine.  Sometimes it is useful to burnish unfired pieces.  Anything that can be done in the unfired stage is the easiest route.

Thursday while I was waiting for my "rebellious teenager piece of jewelry" to be fired, I worked on sanding and burnishing some unfired pieces for my Transit  Series.  Copper clay and silver clay should never be mixed in their unfired state.  Even the tools should not be shared.  (What copper clay does to unfired silver clay can be ugly.)  If they are shared, they need a very good cleaning between uses.  Rather than grab the burnishers I use for silver, I pulled out my trusty knitting needle to burnish the copper pieces.  Like Carol, I made do (in the early years) without the fancy tumbling equipment we now think we need.

So it was back to the beginning for a few minutes!