Tune in to Jewel School

What's better than taking classes from Sherri Haab? When they're free! Sherri will be appearing on Jewelry TV's Jewel School on Thursday, August 11 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. While promoting some exclusive kits on the show, she will demonstrate both metal etching and ITS image transfer. These are examples of the projects she will be teaching you to make.

You will also want to check out the kits that will be sold on the program at a great price. The metal etching kit contains everything you need to etch, along with a bonus of all of the jewelry findings for several pieces of jewelry and a selection of transferable images designed for the copper shapes in the kit.

The ITS kit contains all the materials and findings you need to make a charm bracelet and matching necklace, a full sheet of images ready to transfer and five blank sheets of ITS paper to use for your own personal images.

Don't miss out on this opportunity to see Sherri in action and learn some exciting new skills. BUT WAIT! Of course they will be offering some special deals during the course of the show, so tune in!

Workshops in Australia

While in Australia, I taught a two-day workshop on electroforming and plating. I enjoyed the group and their enthusiasm. I especially appreciated their good humor when our copper plating solution was lacking the necessary acid needed for successful plating on the first day of class. It's not like I can travel with that stuff, so I'm at the mercy of local sources. I lost a bit of sleep that night trying to figure out how to rescue the pieces.

Luckily, Keith Lo Bue, a well-known jewelry artist and teacher came to the rescue. He was attending the class, and just happened to have some hydrochloric acid at home, which he brought in for day two. It worked great, and we were able to finish quite a few pieces. Then we proceeded to plate several of the pieces with gold, silver and nickel using prepared plating solutions. Check out the results in the photo above.

On the second day of the workshop, we etched on copper and then applied images on nickel silver. Then we riveted the pieces together to make mixed-media bracelets. I was so busy, I forgot to take pictures, but the projects were based on my sample shown in this photo.

Who Talks Funny?

Dan joined me part way through my trip to New Zealand, and within hours of his arrival, a competition began between him and Anne Marie about which one of them had the funniest accent and colloquialisms. I think it all started when Anne Marie's daughter Alexia thought the word "graham crackers" was hysterical (she heard it on an American teen movie), so Dan brought her some when he arrived. This was followed by several days worth of new words and phrases to suss out. ("Suss" being one of Dan's newly acquired words.) One such discussion was launched over a misspelling on a menu "Fagita". "Fajita" as it should be spelled could be pronounced several ways, further complicated by the different accents in play. I couldn't help but think of the old tomato song in a new context (you say "faheeta" I say "fa-gita"). In our final etching class, Anne Marie proudly presented Dan with a souvenir - a neatly etched comment for him to treasure.

One one of our free days, Anne Marie and Peter arranged a day trip for us to go with them and their friends, Richard and Alison, to Waiheki Island, which is stunning. We visited a quiet beach near Richard and Alison's vacation home, and enjoyed nice lunch at a local vineyard.


Next, we headed to the earthquake-devastated city of Christchurch. We taught a group of optimistic attendees who were excited to be creative despite having to endure aftershocks and having to boil drinking water. We experienced a 5.3 aftershock while we were there. The pavement moved from side to side under out feet. I've never felt the earth move like that. Dan documented some of the damaged buildings as he made his way around the city in search of an open museum or cafe. Very few tourist attractions were operational.

In tomorrow's blog, see some of the amazing pieces created by students in my class.

Silver, Copper and Polymer Treats

I’m overwhelmed this week, so to both torture and treat myself I spent some time surfing the net to look at lovely blogs that portray perfectly presented gourmet dishes and fairytale lifestyles. To anyone out there that has one of these blogs, Can I please see what is behind the camera?? is it a mess back there and are you wearing your sweats when you post that stuff? Did you all come down from a planet I don’t know about? I’m not kidding I really need to know. Well, however you do this, I enjoy the endless eye candy that is presented for us to dream over.
I got some eye candy in my email this past week that came at a welcome time. Hope you enjoy the etched jewelry pieces here:



Nancy Hamilton sent me a few pictures of pieces she made using our E3 Etch controller. I was blown away! Her work is so well crafted and simply beautiful. She tells me she has developed a system to mass produce pieces, and since each silver piece takes less than an hour to etch she can move quickly to the next piece.



Nancy’s copper etched pieces are richly designed by hand using beeswax as a resist. The center of this copper piece is filled with transparent resin, and has an etched design you can see through the resin.

Another treat this week was to find that my friend, Wendy Wallin Malinow, has her own website up along with her Etsy shop. She is one of the most creative people I know and her style is unmistakable- I love it! I predict anything she touches will be highly collectable, check out her new site.

Etching on Silver

Dan and I spent some time this weekend experimenting with silver etching using the E3 Etch controller. Here is the story with our findings, we are both pretty excited about the results. To start with, we are using a chemical called Silver Nitrate for etching silver. This worked better than other chemicals we tried and produced nice etchings. This is available in powder form and it is not harmful unless large amounts are ingested, so you have to keep this away from pets and children. It is extremely bitter, which helps that situation, but you should educate yourself on safety. The other caution is that it will stain your skin if you touch it. And I’m not kidding, look at my fingers! All I did was touch a few specs of it as we were measuring and pouring the crystals out of the container.

This won’t hurt me, but I am stained now for a good 2 weeks. I am shooting how-tos for a book right now with close ups including my hands, so now I have a lot of photoshop work to do. I suggest you wear gloves when working with it. Other than staining skin, it doesn’t produce fumes or pose an enviromental hazard in the small amounts we are using here. It is sensitive to light and air, so keep it in a bottle in a dark cupboard between uses. And, like the copper sulfate we are using to etch copper and brass, you can use it for a long time. With sterling, the solution will weaken over time as copper from the sterling dissolves into the solution. With fine sterling this shouldn’t be an issue. Simply strain it through a coffee filter and store in a plastic bottle-PET type (Marked with a POISON! label so no one drinks it).

To etch the silver, we mixed 10g. of silver nitrate with 1/2 liter of distilled water. The first piece we tried was sterling silver. The piece was sanding and then I wrote on it with a fine Shapie oil paint pen, it’s the little square that says “Dan & Sherri”. We etched this piece for 30 min on slow and it etched pretty quick. If left longer, the etch would have gone deeper. The silver etches about 3-4 times faster than copper does. The second piece was a PMC standard silver clay heart bead. This piece was originally overheated and melted a bit as it sintered so the outside was rough and bumpy. I wrote on this one with an extra fine Sharpie oil pen. I put a bent aluminum wire through one of the holes to suspend it and provide contact. I taped around the edge and sealed the back. I found it easier to “hang” the piece rather than using foam spacers because it didn’t have any sides to attach the spacers. Since it was a curved shape with a bumpy surface, I filled the the pan with enough etching solution to cover only the part I wanted to etch. The tape was used mainly to keep the piece level in the solution, and not as a barrier for the solution. We found that the wooden chopsticks did a great job to hold the wire. This piece was etched for 2 hours on slow speed. It was much slower than the sterling piece as it is larger and was suspened quite a bit higher from the bottom of the pan. When removed the metal clay has a very “crystaline” structure where the metal etched away. As soon as the piece was rinsed off and burnished the background was pretty smooth. I need to experiment more with PMC3 or + to see how they compare. This photo shows the set up for etching on the fine silver bead. Now that we have this figured out, I need to make some “wearable” pieces with cool designs.

PMC standard on left, Sterling on right

Metal Clay Class 101

Tonight I promised the attendees from the craftcast metal clay101 class that I would post a picture of Michelle’s ring. She made this ring without a mandrel and used only a needle tool to write script in the wet clay. It is very tiny, like a pinky ring.



I etched this brass cuff bracelet this weekend. I used a pen to draw freehand on the brass and then etched it with the E3 Etch controller. I want to make more of these, if only there were more hours in the day.


Here is another view of the etched bracelet.

Etching on Metal, going green

Last summer my husband Dan, who is an electrical engineer, observed that many of the bead shows I was teaching at featured metal etching classes. He was surprised to see that all of them were using ferric chloride as a way to chemically etch the metal to create the jewelry pieces. He said, “Why are they still doing it that way?” In recent years this chemical has been harder to come by, it cannot be shipped and is hazardous to dispose of. After some research he decided to experiment with electrical etching (which by the way dates back to the late 1700′s) however, combined with new technology he discovered a better way to accomplish electrical etching. Dan designed a micro-controller, which is a small brain that regulates the voltage to constantly adjust which in turn allows one to safely etch in a predictable fashion.

After countless hours of experimentation and programming, Dan finally came up with a design he was satisfied with. We decided to patent and market this product as a tool that would allow craftspeople to etch on copper, brass, nickel silver or even bronze and copper clay without having to deal with methods that were more problematic. The best part is that it is Green! With today’s emphasis on using products that do not harm the environment, this meets the criteria. With this product, the etching solution can be re-used indefinitely so you never have to think about buying etching supplies other than what you plan to etch on. Or if you decide to dispose of the solution, you simply flush it down the drain (it’s meant to be used this way to keep pipes free of tap roots).

So nine months later, we are starting to sell these from my webstore, which by the way has a new format.

We are pretty anxious to see what bench jewelers and jewelry artists come up with using this product. I was super excited to use it on metal clay, thanks to a suggestion by Kathleen Davis. We are also able to use it for silver etching as well as ectroforming and electroplating. For silver etching, a different etching solution must be used. We are in the process of developing the correct ratio and method for etching on silver. My good friend Cassy Muronaka has been very supportive with ideas and promoting this product, I can’t wait to see how she uses it in her work.