Metalwork: Sinking a shallow bowl

Sinking is a method of creating a shallow bowl shape from a flat disk of metal, by hammering it against a dipped surface to shape it. I worked in concentric circles from near the edge to the centre, which stretches the metal in the middle and makes the dish shape.

this gives a good overall bowl shape, but leaves a very lumpy texture from the hammer.

once I was happy with the shape of my bowl and I had got it as deep as I wanted it, I started planishing it to create a smooth texture, but one which would still have hammer marks on. I used a round stake and  a flat, shiny hammer, which meant the marks it left were shiny and even.

I used the same method of concentric circles to do this, so it would be even and wouldn't be misshaped.

Another Vessel

For my next vessel, I wanted it to be mixed media, rather than just metal. I tried to keep with the idea of repairing something, so before I could do that, I had to break something. That 'something' ended up being the pottery bowl I made in the exploratory stage. I decided to drop it onto my kitchen floor, and this broke it into quite large shards. It would have been possible to carefully glue the pieces all together again, without much difficulty, but I wanted to make the repairs more obvious than that, I wanted to use parts that didn't originally come from the pot.

I decided to cast two of the smaller shards in pewter, and used small strips of masking tape to stick two of the larger pottery pieces together. I then only had one other piece, which I decided to make out of felt, because felt is something nobody would use for a vessel, something that would make the bowl useless, so it now has no function except decoration. I used wire to hold the felt piece to the rest of the bowl, and glue to hold in the metal pieces.

For the felt piece, I used merino tops, and needle felted them to make it the same shape as the gap in the bowl. I sewed a piece of wire across the piece so It would keep its curved shape.

The glue was quite difficult to control, and came out of the joins, but instead of taking it off the surface, I decided to leave it, to make it very obvious that this object had been changed, broken and repaired.