LEARNING TO WORK IN COPPER

I promised myself I would try something new over the winter months, and although it's almost spring now (yippee!), I have begun to work with copper sheet. I love the look of copper, the colors you can achieve, so I purchased a 12x12 piece of copper sheeting, grabbed my scizzors, and cut myself out a square piece of metal. I cut the square in half to make to triangles and flattened and smoothed the edges with my chasing hammer. After this, I used the ball side of the hammer and created some texture interest into the copper by simple pounding. I attached a piece of copper wire at the top and folded the pointed top edge of the copper over the wire and hammered to hold it in place. I used a small file to soften the corners of the piece and then decided then to curl them under, for effect, as well as eliminating the sharp point from contact with the skin. Now, mind you, I know nothing about metal work and was simply going on things I had picked up from jewelry shows and videos I watch. So, IF ANYONE OUT THERE DOES METAL WORK, PLEASE GIVE ME SOME POINTERS!! To continue, I found some green tinted sea shells I had wire-wrapped previously and decided they would be a perfect addition to the earrings and added them to the top/front of the pieces. And voila, put on the earwires, and my earrings were done.....but, that was not the end. I decided I needed to purchase a butane torch to add to my metal working supplies and did so at my local hardware store, along with a piece of firebrick from our local brick and stone company for 50 cents. I was ready for my next step in metal work!!! But, I was a little nervous, so waited til my friend Jeanne (and fellow beader at http://gammiebrat.blogspot.com/) was over and while Jeanne worked on her resin beads, I braved the butane torch for the first time. Now, I am telling you this, because I decided to do some more work on the earrings. I fired them up, annealed the metal, and decided to put some waves into them. I also wanted to get some color into them through the annealing process, but must have waited to long and lost the lovely colors...definitely a timing issue there. But, did end up with my lovely copper earrings shown above...not too bad for a novice who doesn't know what she's doing!! PLEASE, TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK...I CAN TAKE THE CRITICISM, AS THAT'S HOW I HOPE TO LEARN. And...let me know if you liked the post.

p.s. - I added a third picture of some metal that I torched and I did get the colors I wanted - pretty, yes? So, I am learning...it's a process. Any ideas now what I should do with them. Jeanne suggested filing, smoothing, and making pretty fish out of them! Tell me what you think. Thanks for reading my post. I hope it will encourage anyone out there to try something new. It's a process and it's fun! Anita