more new earrings

More with my oxidized copper tubes. On the right is an earring that was one of my favorites until my wearing it turned it brown. It's just an octahedron, but when you use some long tubes and some short ones, you get interesting shapes. The one on the left is the new one with patinated copper tubes and little accent beads. You can see that the original one was just the tubes. I guess it's because of my own gray hair that I feel like the dark gray tubes won't show up enough without accent beads. I spent quite a while playing with the liver of sulphur today, and it's trickier that I thought at first. I have several necklaces that are gorgeous flame orange around the bottom and brown where they were next to my undoubtedly sweaty neck(this is Florida, after all). Most of them use melons as well as tubes. I found the melons gave the necklaces more weight, and so they hung better. With all the beads, I hadn't liked the new-penny-pink of the raw copper, and so I hit them with a propane torch to turn them darker. They turned a lovely orange. But now I realize that alot of what I was doing was burning off the lacquer they were coated in. When they started to go brown, I found the melons held their color better. Now I realize that was largely because their greater mass kept them from heating up as quickly as the tubes, so I didn't burn off all of the lacquer. I was hoping I could put a whole necklace in the liver of sulphur solution and just turn it gray. But the melons get mottled, instead of all gray. Eventually the L of S turns them all gray or black, but by that time the tubes have a black coating that comes off on your hands. Not good. More experimentation is in order.