Heather,
Here is a simple way to anneal your silver that I teach to my students so they don’t melt their metal. I learned this at a workshop many years ago. It works great for anyone, but especially new metal artists who have a hard time seeing the color change in the metal when it is heated to a dull red color in a well lit room.
Like Rob says, coil your wire and then put black sharpie marks all over the coil. You don’t have to coat the whole thing, just put some marks evenly over the whole piece. Skip the boric acid and alcohol coat because the alcohol will dissolve the sharpie marks. Heat the metal until the black sharpie “ghost’s out” and disappears. Stop heating, wait about 30 seconds - longer for ingots or similar large mass of metal - so the metal can cool to about 500 degrees F, and quench in clear water. You’re done. You will need to pickle to get rid of the oxidation on the silver, but it beats heating to red and having your metal wire fuse together, or worse melting into a puddle of goo and having to start over making your wire.
A couple of other points: Most precious metals and their alloys will become annealed around 1000 degrees F (538 C). This method works on gold and Argentium Silver also, but when annealing Argentium, do NOT quench at all. Allow it to cool to room temp. I just place it on a thick piece of steel and allow it to act as a heat sink to cool my silver.
I was taught way back when that you need to heat your metal to a dull red color, so when I learned in the workshop to use black sharpie ink it was a godsend. My newbies weren’t continually melting up their silver when annealing. I’m not sure why black permanent marker and not other colors, but my guess would be that permanent ink colors other than black will burn off at a lower temp than black. If you don’t have a black permanent marker, according to Charles Lewton-Brain in his book on Foldforming (thanks Charles) you can use other things as an indicator that you have reached the proper temperature such as blue carpenter’s chalk (turns white at annealing temp), and Ivory Soap (turns black at proper temp)
Good luck, and Happy Holidays to all.
Mike Campbell