Wednesdays developments...

I've been experimenting with the forming of copper in order to make an upper for my shoes...

The process of annealing is necessary first to soften the metal,

 Then use a nylon hammer to get it into the right sort of shape, on an anvil,

 Then a use a metal hammer to refine the shape... also, the shine on the hammer tip comes off onto the copper... this process is called planishing,

I used a different anvil as well to get a better shape,

This was what I acheived. I love the shape that I managed to get with just a couple of anvils, and also the shiny effect looks really great. However the whole shoe would be hard to make using this process so I have decided to use this for just the tip of the shoe, looking something like this chanel shoe

with thich copper wire to form the rest of the structure. The shape I hope to acheive will look like the spire of a building, winding once around the wearers ankle, with a few random pannels of mirror and copper lace...

Not a great image but I've alredy blogged about this so see previous!

I've also found a possible fixing method

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I may use this copper tape to edge my soles and solder the wire onto this, I do need to practice soldering though as I'm quite new to it!

I have also found a better way of slumping my soles into the right shape and that is using steel... like so,

I've used kiln paper for the top as steel will cool at a quicker rate than glass, so the paper will stop it breaking... I hope...
This will give a much smoother finish as my ceramics skills are horrendous! I will find out a lot sooner if the steel method is effective, as opposed to stoneware which has to be fired before the glass even touches it, which will give me a lot more time to put things right if anything goes wrong. I am very optimistic!