kerravonsen | Another Pendant

Pendant, finished today:

Pendant; stamped copper, paint/ink pen, clear embossing powder

This is another stamped, inked and sealed pendant, but I had a Eureka moment with it, when I attempted stamping with my newly-acquired 2lb sledgehammer and still failed to make an impression. The copper needed to be annealed.

Not having a kiln or a butane torch or a bunsen burner, I used what I had to hand: the burner from a gas stove. Holding the copper in narrow metal tongs (I think they might have been faux chopsticks) I held it in the flames until it (and the tongs!) went dull red and dropped it in a Pyrex dish of water. Instant black! So I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed with steel wool (and it started pricking into my fingers, ow) until it was 99% clean.

Then I tried stamping it again. This time it worked! Nice impressions with one or two blows. So now I know: anneal first.

Then I coloured in the stamped area with a dual-colour paint pen; it was a sort of hybrid pen which had silver paint and purple ink, which, if you used it on paper, gave a purple outline to a silver stroke. Here it just looked lavender-ish silver. Then I cleaned the surface with a nail file block, looked at it, and felt that it wasn't contrasty enough. So I filled in some of the stars with black permanent-ink pen, and cleaned that. I didn't like that either, since it made the lavender look even more washed out. So I rubbed out the black with alcohol, which took out some of the lavender, so I applied it again. But before I started filing it again, I tried rubbing some of it off with cotton, and I got an interesting effect, it rubbed off the silver and left a pinkish purple where I'd rubbed. So I kept rubbing.

But then when I applied the clear embossing powder and it melted, I ended up with an even stranger effect, sort of dots of concentrated magenta, and well, look at the picture. Not what I expected, but interesting.