Hello Everyone!

I would like to take a moment and apologize for missing a week of blogging. Things around the studio have been rather hectic. Aside from traveling for a class in Jackson Michigan at the end of August, we are trying to get everything together for our trip to England. As of today we leave for London in 9 days. This is really going to be an adventure.

Our trip to England isn’t only for pleasure. We have 3 fully booked Wire Art classes that we’ll be teaching. That’s where all of the stress is coming from. I counted up all of the metal that we’ll need for the classes and it amounts to a whopping 46 ounces. That has to be the most metal that I have ever purchased in one sitting. We plan to take plenty of pictures and video of our adventure and I plan to post them here when we get back.

Now on to other news.

I learned something new when I was in Michigan. During my wiresmith class we got on the subject of annealing. I explained what it is, why you do it, and the basic procedure involved in annealing metal. I passed along my little trick to know when the metal has reached the point where it’s annealed – flux becomes watery when it reaches about 1100 degrees Fahrenheit. One of the students passed along another indicator that can be used and I would like to pass that along to all of you.

Take a permanent marker and draw a line across the metal that is to be annealed. Begin heating the metal as you normally would when annealing. As the metal reaches the point of annealing (around 1100 degrees Fahrenheit depending on the metal) the permanent marker line will begin to fade and almost disappear. Once it fades the metal should be properly annealed. Neat trick, huh? To me that seems much simpler than painting the entire piece with flux.

I must point out though that I would only use this when working with Argentium. Why? As all of you know (I talk about it all of the time) Argentium can be heated without using flux because it doesn’t develop firescale. Other metals – fine silver, sterling silver, gold and so forth – need to be protected with flux when annealing.

Last Bit of News

I wanted to remind everyone that we still have a couple discounted books available so if you’re interested in saving a bit of cash (and who isn’t these days) stop by –

http://www.macjewels.com/bookdeal.html

Well, that’s all for now.

‘til next week,

Jim McIntosh