The other week I had my last enamels class of the summer (sadness). Because the summer session is so short, I didn’t have any grand plans for anything, but wanted to play around with a wee bit of metal forming and making earrings. I started off this particular pendant wanting it to have a nice gradient of transparent red to gray. Unfortunately while I had it in the kiln, I managed to overfire the red (this is easy to do with reds) and it became a disgusting opaque vomitous brown. I was pretty upset because before this accident the red was really quite lovely and I destroyed it so quickly. After that unfortunate moment I decided I had nothing to lose, so I intentionally continued to overfire it until it was obvious nothing else would change. It was still an object unpleasing to the eye, so I put it under the torch (weeee!). To my pleasant surprise, putting a torch to enamels in the right way gives even the most foul of colors a metallic pearlescent sheen. After playing around with this a bit I decided the piece was finally done and acceptable. This is nothing I would have intentionally created, but sometimes it’s fun to mess up and then play around with the piece until you get something else completely.