Well I was bored last weekend so I decided to have a little go and trying to enamel some old charms thinking that it would be a bit of fun, and might breathe some colourful life into charms which I have otherwise pretty much stopped wearing on any of my charm bracelets.  Anyway, this led me to a local art store where I asked what I needed to put some enamel onto my charms.  I should explain here that I have no experience of enameling charms, and to be honest didn’t really know what I was talking about.

The assistant pointed me in the direction of some enamel painting kits which I bought unquestioningly, however the results have been very disappointing so this post is as a quick warning to those who might try and follow in my footsteps.  It turns out that ‘real enamel’ isn’t paint at all, but actually glass which is applied in tiny little shards to a metal surface and then fired in a kiln to melt it into place.  This process is repeated to build up layers and the result is a beautiful smooth glossy finish to the charms.  Enamel paint is not like this.  Now obviously I don’t have a kiln, so I am never going to get the results which ‘real enamel’ achieves, but I found enamel paint very disappointing, it doesn’t have any weight, it doesn’t have any shine, and within a few hours of it drying it had cracked and was starting to peel off one of the charms.

So fun charm enameling experiment over, I’ve learnt the hard way that if you want beautiful enameled charms then you are probably best off buying them.