Living in New Orleans has it’s perks: wonderful music, tasty food, oysters, seafood, oysters, live oak trees dripping with Spanish moss, gorgeous architecture, oysters. But it also has a lot of drawbacks: floods, hurricanes, murder, mayhem, potholes you can swim in, backward thinking, racism (from all sides), a “who you know” closed society etc. But the thing that really bugs me is I can’t get stuff. You know, like liver of sulphur. Of course you don’t know. It’s a metal thing. To make it dark. A couple of decades ago, I used it a lot, here’s a piece I made from the 80s (thankfully I kept some of my old jewelry in the attic and it was never damaged by the floodwaters in 2005).

Oxidized Copper & Fine Silver Necklace, 1985

Since I have resurrected my jewelry “career”, I have focused on rocks. I think I’ve mentioned that I love rocks, right?  In general, I just use the metal to show off the rocks. No fancy metalwork. Yesterday, I had a message from a woman who wanted to purchase a pair of earrings, but wanted to know if  it would be “possible to have oxidized silver or brass? I’m trying to match a necklace I have”. Sure, I thought, I’ll just get some of that Liver Of Sulphur I used to use. Oh wait. I live in New Orleans.

I remember in school doing an experiment with eggs, but the metal always came out unevenly oxidized. What to do? What to do?  Ahh, use egg “fumes”! (Don’t you just love google?) I boiled an egg, mashed it, put it in a “Tupperware” container, suspended the earrings over the hot “fumes” and covered it. I was expecting to check on it it the morning. They were ready in half an hour.

 

Before the Egg

After the Egg

Is this cool or what?