For these Butterfly series, I enjoy experimenting combination of colours and surface finishes with natural semi-precious stone beads as making variations. Even if the same design and applied same colour and beads, somehow never able to create the same one, because handcrafted.

 

            Cut out copper sheet for Butterfly shape and clean up the edge of the metal.

After cleaning up the metal, first coat /base coat of glass powder like enamel is applied.

For paste colour Butterfly, opaque white is used on the front side to make beautiful matte pastel colour.

Very thin fine silver (100% pure silver) foil is applied in the additional firing process to make transparent to semi-transparent colour depth.

 

Cloisonné wire (fine silver 100% pure silver ribbon-like wire) will be bent into shape in design and laid on the base metal and fire to fuse on the surface.

 

And then washed powder like glass colour Enamel will be applied to cells and fired.

This part of the process will be repeated until the cells are filled with enamels and almost even height as the cloisonné wire.

Sometimes the different colour of enamel will be applied to each firing to enhance colours.

It takes normally the total of 5 to 8 or even more firing processes are required to finish the pieces.

 

For large butterflies, after each cell was filled almost even height as cloisonné wire with enamels, apply ‘stoning' (for large butterflies), grinding on the surface under the running water to make smooth, even surface and enhance the design of cloisonné wire.

 

And then after carefully clean up, put in the kiln one last time to melt the surface to give glossy shiny finish, or to make matte satin finish continue to polishing with several different grits of stones and polishing paper. Also, the edge will clean up and polish to make nice finishing.

 

Finally, add beads, chain and findings and make into the necklace.