Granulation with fine silver...

If you are interested in granulation, enameling or metal working  you should visit the new blog, Experiments With Glass and Silver by Lillian Jones. She's got an excellent post up now about how to fuse the granulated bits with a fusing aid. Lillian writes poetically about the very prosaic work of heating and forming metal and her stepped-out, how-to photos are tremendously clear and helpful. Lillian also demonstrates a method for creating silver granules that was developed by Iris Sandkuhler and will give you something WAY better to do with that Fry Daddy you have in the pantry.

here is a link to Lillian's blog
here is a link to her granulation class at Ornamentea, come take an in-person class with her!

*and Lillian gave me a random, 'six-degrees of separation' moment earlier this year when she told me about her friend, the artist Iris Sandkuhler. Iris was a drawing TA in a few classes I took at Ohio State waaaaayyyy back in the late 80's. She has no reason to remember me: I was a proto-goth, black-clad art student in a sea of Doc Martens on a giant university campus. But I do remember Iris; she had such a musical name and seemed so intently cool in the way graduate students always are. I'm excited to see all the things she is now doing in the jewelry and metals world.