World of WarCrafts: Getting hammered

World of WarCrafts spotlights art and creativity by WoW players, including fan art, cooking, comics, cosplay, music and fan fiction. Show us how you express yourself; contact our tips line (attention: World of WarCrafts) with your not-for-profit, WoW-inspired creations.

Here's a type of craft we haven't seen much of before: a hammered metal bowl that simply bellows "For the Horde!" Talk about taking blacksmithing to a whole new level ... We visited with Blazecheetah, the bowl's maker, to find out more about the crafting behind her creation. Her play-by-play on its creation is an intriguing peek behind the scenes, if you've never been exposed to metalcrafting before.

"The bowl is made of 16-gauge copper that was originally a flat, square sheet," she explains. "I cut a circle shape out of it, then did the ol' fashioned method of raising a bowl shape, which involves making a small indent in the center of the circle, making some guideline rings (think of a bullseye) around it; then, using a T stake and a certain type of hammer, went around the bowl hammering it in a spiral like pattern, following the guidelines. Between each round of hammering, you have to do what's called annealing, which is basically just heating up the metal with a torch until it's red hot, then dousing it in water. This keeps the metal soft and easy to work with."

"Eventually, after you do the hammering and annealing so many times," she continues, "it'll be a bowl shape. Mine started out as much more V-shaped than it is now, with the bottom being pointed, but that was easily taken care of with a flat stake and a rawhide mallet."

Next up was the enameling process. "Enamel is basically just powdered glass in funky colors," Blazecheetah explains. "It starts out sandy, but once you heat it up to a certain temperature, it turns into a glass coating. I started out by trying out an opaque brown color on the outside. It looked ok, but I wanted to see what this other, transparent brown I had looked like."

Here's where a sense of adventure and a willingness to follow where the piece itself was leading paid off big. Working with enamel has to be executed with haste, Blazecheetah explains, or it cracks. "I coated the inside with the transparent brown quickly," she recalls. "'Quickly' involved me not being able to clean out some of the black residue left from using the torch on it -- but it actually ended up giving it a really cool effect on the inside. I liked it so much that I decided to try it with the outside. The outside ended up not showing the effect as much as the inside of the bowl does, due to the coat of opaque brown already being on it, so the outside of the bowl is darker than the inside."

The next step was to coat the bottom inside the bowl with black, a process called wet packing. "Doing this is a lot like doing watercolor with wet sand," Blazecheetah observes. "You even use a paintbrush to do it." Once the black was packed in, she used a stencil of the Horde symbol in the bottom of the bowl. "This was the hardest part for me, to be honest," she admits, "because you have to lift the stencil straight up or it ends up knocking the enamel powder all over the place, and you have to wipe it out and start again. My hands are just not that steady ..."

Once the enamel was complete, it was time to sand and polish the edges. Blazecheetah chose to leave the edges crooked and uneven for a more Horde-like feel. We're certainly feeling it -- as did the other viewers at WoW Ladies, where we first spotted this work of art. Congratulations on a great piece, Blazecheetah. For the Horde!