Part five of six: THR Crystals

English Transcription of Video:

Hi, thanks for stopping by Angel Gilding. I'm Alix, and today we're continuing on with our new silver antiquing series. Today we'll be exploring THR Crystals. THR is a form of sulfur that is odorless and we are going to be exploring two different ways to use THR crystals during the antiquing process. Now, both times we are going to be working with pouring silver, but you'll probably catch on the second technique that it could actually be done just the same with the spray silver. Keeping in mind of course, that what we share here are just points of inspiration. That's not to say that these are the only ways you can use these products. Certainly let your creativity be your guide. As always, we're going to be working with six inch single strength glass for both of our pieces, and keep in mind, while you're trying this, make sure that you take really good notes on the specifics of what you did to create the effect that you like so that you can recreate it.
Without further ado, let's jump right in. As always, every mirroring project is going to start off with a very thorough cleaning of the glass. We're using powdered glass cleaner as well as our serum oxide here. It's really important to make sure that your glass is completely clean so that you don't have any kind of contamination on the glass that could affect the results that you see. Once we've done the cleaning, we will go ahead and rinse it off with distilled water and then it's going to be distilled water from here on out. We want to make sure that any of that regular tap water that we use for cleaning is completely rinsed off. Once we've done that, we'll pour on our diluted tin for silver. I do want to note that tin does look cloudy. That's just the lighting. You do want to make sure your tin is absolutely clear and once you've allowed it to deposit for 30 seconds, you rinse that off really well. There's no such thing as too much rinsing here with the tin, so make sure that all of that excess tin has been rinsed off the surface. Take some time to make sure you do that On the other side as well. As I mentioned, we're going to be working with pouring silver here, so for this first effect, we're just mixing the chemicals together and then pouring them over the glass. 
Set a timer for 30 seconds and then gently rock the glass. So for that first 30 seconds, we rocked the glass. Now I'm sprinkling in the THR crystals directly onto the silver surface, so those silver chemicals are still in place on the glass, and now I'm going to allow that to fully deposit for five minutes. From this angle, you can see it does not look like much has changed, but you'll see now that I'm rinsing it off, it's truly a dramatic effect. Take your time with this rinsing. You can see those THR crystals can be kind of pesky to rinse off the glass, but you do want to make sure you've fully removed every single crystal off the glass because otherwise they're going to further antique or degrade that silver surface. So take your time working top to bottom, rinsing off every bit of those crystals and get a sneak peek of just how brilliant and dramatic that effect is. There's some darker areas, some bright silver areas. When I turn it over, you can see there's some excess silver. We clean that up later. Nothing to worry about. 
This is our second piece here. We're going to go through the same process processes before we've already cleaned it, we're rinsing it off with the distilled water, making sure to get all of that tap water off tin the glass as we usually do once again with that diluted tin or silver, rocking that over the surface for 30 seconds. Rinsing off the tin really well. You always want to make sure that you get all that excess tin rinsed off the surface. And then for this piece, we're mixing up our pouring chemicals once again, and these chemicals are going to flow over the glass. You can see really in this shot, the surface tension of the glass. We're allowing the silver to fully deposit as we usually do while rocking the glass for the full five minutes. So really what we're doing here is creating a traditional perfect silver mirror. Once we've allowed those chemicals to deposit for the full five minutes, we're going to rinse off the excess silver chemicals,

And if I stopped

Here, I would have a traditional perfect silver mirror. Of course, we are going to be going for a antique mirror, so I'm going to sprinkle on the THR crystals and then I'm spritzing it here with just a little bit of the distilled water for our sprayer, and that allows the THR to dissolve for a bit. We let it sit for a full hour and then we rinse it off. Once again, that t h r is going to be pesky. We just let it sit on the surface for one hour undisturbed, and the results here is much less dramatic, a more gentle antiquing, and you'll see that really come through towards the end. Just checking here to see if it looks how I want it to. I could always apply another layer if I'd like to, but I'm going to go ahead and paint them. I'm using our black mirror back in paint. It's important to note when you're working with antique mirrors, you want to be careful in terms of how you're painting it. I'm using a foam brush here. You could also certainly use a roller or you can even spray the paint on the glass, making sure to get all of the areas fully covered, fully protected with that backing paint so that none of the silver is exposed to air, none of it can be allowed to oxidize. 
Here we have our finished antique mirrors that we made using THR crystals. Now, I think these really demonstrate the wide range of effects that you can get by just changing up a few different things. Now, we see here with our sample that has the THR during the silvering process, a much more dramatic effect. There's a lot of areas where the silver layer ended up being quite thin because of the action of the THR. It's got a nice patterning similar to almost an animal print with pockets of the bright silver popping through. Now, this effect with the THR is quite dramatic, so keep in mind when you're painting the back that that's really going to show through. We really see here pockets of that black mirror backing paint and you want to be careful with your application to make sure that you're not streaking through the mirror.
Certainly some things to keep in mind there. Now with our other sample, this was the THR after the silvering, so remember that silver had fully developed, and so what we have here is a much more gentle effect. We've got some pinhole appearances, somewhat similar to what we see with the basal powder. However, the THR will dissolve in water, and so we do have some nice movement, some flow across the mirror. So two beautiful results. But as always, let your creativity be your guide. There's a lot of different ways that you can change things up just by using t h r crystals. I certainly recommend that you take a look at all of our other videos about antiquing. If you have any questions about this process, these pieces, or anything else related to antique mirrors, you can ask those in the comment box below, or you can always reach out to us on our website, AngelGilding.com. Thanks for stopping by.