The Midas Touch

I would love to do more work in gold, but it's too hard on the budget. So I learned how to do Keum Boo (or Kum Boo), a Japanese technique of diffusing bits of thin gold foil onto silver. Fine silver (no alloys) works perfectly. If you use sterling silver (which has copper and other alloys), you must use a process called depletion gilding to bring the fine silver to the surface and then apply the gold. Even though I've done a couple of Keum Boo projects already, I just purchased a book by Celie Fago called Keum-boo on Silver to fine tune my skills. 

Here is a toggle clasp that I made using this technique. I textured a sheet of silver using my rolling mill, then made the toggle with my disk cutter and applied the gold circles. I'm excited about the results!