Peg Seriani

United States

“ Pale Enigma “

My theme is Pale Enigma and when I received it, I instantly thought of a unicorn. I thought the unicorn would be a challenging design for me and it was. I used Inkscape to draw my design. I made 2 versions of the design. The leaves are different in each piece and also, one piece has all silver wires while the other has gold wires for the unicorn body. The pieces were large and that made it very difficult to fuse.

Part way through the fusing process, I had to switch to a rosebud torch head in order to get enough heat to fuse the pieces. I ran into a problem on the Gold unicorn when a gold wire fell over on the unicorn's front leg. I couldn't pull out the wire so I had to enamel over it. The other problem that occurred on the Gold unicorn, was I accidentally put a gouge to the left of the unicorn's mane during the grinding stage. I believe it happened because I was likely grinding too aggressively and the diamond disc wasn't sitting straight on the mandrel. I believe the velcro holding the disc to the mandrel had come loose. I am disappointed that the Gold unicorn didn't turn out as good as I wanted, but I definitely learned a lot.

This was the first time that I worked with white enamels, gold wires and using Inkscape. I think that my color blending improved from the first to the second piece. I enjoyed the design and fabrication process and I'm ready to take what I've learned and dive into my next project.