Halloween in Fanta Se

Although Santa Fe is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful cities in the US, it certainly has its dark side.  All those posh adobe hotels and expensive galleries downtown are a pretty veneer on a very, very old and very strange place.  I love Halloween and my city definitely has some of the scariest places to visit that I have ever seen.  More often than not, buildings in Santa Fe have ghosts or at least ghost stories.  The house next door has reports of a man who walks up and down the parking lot at 4 or 5 in the morning.  To beat them all is the old prison on Route 14 (the Turquoise Trail).  After a riot in the '80s, the prison has remained empty of living prisoners- spooky!  Visit if you're feeling brave...

Mystery Alloy

Here are a few new cloisonnes in progress- fine silver laminated with copper using eutectic solder. Notice the dark spots on the large piece: the solder has eaten through the silver to form nice little craters! The eutectic solder must've formed some strange alloy when it melted between the two layers of pure metal. I'll still enamel the piece just to see what might happen...

Nambe Lake

Photos from my beautiful Labor Day excursion 3 miles up Winsor trail in the Santa Fe ski basin.

Die-pressed shapes

I just returned from Jim Cohen's studio where I got to press these exciting shapes from a masonite die. I can them stick them in the pitch bowl for further shaping, or enamel them.

New camera fun...

Better pictures, hopefully. Working with the new camera sure makes things easier! I'm having much less trouble with glare on the enamels and the zoom capacity is amazing. These pictures have not even been cropped or modified in any way!

Slowly working on enameling 3D objects. Here are a few copper beads in process; the first pic shows the beads with base coats of enamel and silver foil, the next shows cloisonne circles attached to the beads with lily root glue. The glue is amazingly easy to use- the wires stick almost immediately and you can manipulate the form without the wires falling off or even moving.