Thanks Fred, I was hoping you would catch this post. I'll give it a try.

Lorrie,
Hey gal you are just moving right along. Looks pretty darn good. Must of had one heck of a teacher or you are a very fast learner. LOL

Are you going to plannish it some more or is your arm wore out?

If you do not want to mess around with the sawdust, just wrap in saran wrap.
Wet the copper with the ammonia, sprinkle on some sea salt and wrap. Let set couple of hours and when you take off the saran wrap make sure you do not touch it. Let dry than rinse. Wax.

www Metalrecipes -- heat and beat to the desired shape, repeat as necessary.
warren

Ah-well I guess the answer would be YES, since the apprentice is still learning. Thanks for the great teaching. I have a long way to go. Would like to just get one completed that looks good. I'll try both processes for the patina. I have another one I am working on but it has a very rippled/wavy effect about 1/3 of the way done. Should I try to plannish this to flatten it out a bit, or just keep pounding on the ripples as I travel along the rows? It's getting hard to follow along the rows with the metal raising up right where I need to pound it down (if that makes any sense at all).
Lorrie

Lorrie, maybe switch to the other hand to hammer with, grin.
If it is the first round it will get very rippled. If too much to handle, do a rough plannish with wooden hammer. Anneal and start where you left off. Try to take less of a bite.

www Metalrecipes -- heat and beat to the desired shape, repeat as necessary.
warren

Lorrie,

Looks to me like you're doing fine!

After every series of raising, you should bouge the piece thoroughly with a rawhide mallet over a stake. Do this with all the force you can muster - really whale the hell out of it! This evens out the stresses, knocks down a lot of the ripple effect and gives you a better place to start when doing the next series.

Occasionally, when I'm raising in copper (which is really soft), I find that one course is more pronounced than the previous one. If that happens, then I will bouge a bit before i go on to the next course. Generally though, I just do all the courses for the series, bouge the piece, anneal and start the next series. If the bouging after raising didn't even things out enough to suit me, I might bouge lightly after annealing, too.

Hey, raising is a process that looks really rough until you get almost finished, sometimes. If you do the narrowest possible courses and only move them a moderate amount each time you can have a piece that looks less lumpy while "in progress", but you'll take a lot longer to finish it, too. I'm impatient so I whack away, bouge a lot and keep it moving as fast as I can. I usually get away with it. (grin)

Rich

Thanks Rich, I can't wait to learn more about this process. My next big adventure will be to try and tackle a type of vase. Not sure what kind of tools needed for that.

The same basic tools, Lorrie. Stakes and hammers. You may need to find or make a stake that has a curvature to match the vase so yo can get it inside the mouth of the vase when the raising progresses to that point.

For some really good information on raising, I would commend to your attention the book "Silversmithing" by Rupert Feingold.

Rich