Happy accident

We are still busy with our move to Ocean Shores. It is a slow process, moving one car load at a time on our days off. Now that tax season is here, it seems we hardly have any time off together.

  This last weekend I had three days because of Presidents Day, but Dan had to beg to get Saturday off. We loaded up a lot of stuff for my studio and headed down after work. Saturday was a very busy day not only with unloading the car, then finding that my storage drawers I had such hopes of fitting in the closet were half an inch too long. Now I have piles of shoe boxes that I had unloaded from these storage  units taking up way too much space my studio until I can figure out another option.  Lord Opuson is like "just put the units in the garage", but I don't want to be traipsing out there every time I need another Mica powder or bead.

    Then at noon I headed over to the Gallery of Ocean Shores for a memorial gathering  remembering Ken Whitmore, an extremely talented photographer who was killed in an automobile accident several months ago. It was a very good turn out. He had touched a lot of people who showed up to pay their respects. Got to meet several members of his family and more artists that show at the gallery. Then at 5 o'clock, was the quarterly Gallery meeting.

Such a busy day I hardly had any time to play with my clay, but I did get in a few hours between the memorial and meeting. Being so rushed actually led to a happy accident with the clay. Before I went over to the memorial I had started to create some veneers using Debbie Crothers Swellegant tutorial.  In my haste I forgot instructions for adding the patina. The patina is supposed to be added when the
Swellegant Metal Coating is still wet but I forgot and let it dry. Then I put on the patina and went to the meeting. When I came back to the studio, instead of a beautiful flowering verdigris color, I had zip, nada, nothing...
 

 As you can see this is a real a lackluster veneer. There are a few sparkly bits, but overall pretty flat and lifeless. I figured what the heck, last time I had a butt-ugly veneer, I was able to save it. I quickly made a dagger pendant using it and a tiny bit of leftover pink veneer. It came out of the oven pretty ugly, and I thought for sure it was going into the trash.

That is when the surprise happened. When I added the glaze, all of a sudden the invisible patina blossomed.
    See the pretty blue patches ... they weren't there till I brushed on the varnish.

I am going to have to experiment to discover if this was just a fluke or if I can reproduce it.