Actually leaf can be used in Kum Boo and them rolled on a
rolling mill for texture. To use the leaf, watch the heat
intently and burnish quickly as the gold begans to adhere to the
silver. I used an old copper bottom skillet on an electric stove
for my Kum Boo. Try it! you might just have a use for your gold leaf
The trouble with leaf isn’t only that being so thin it’s harder
to work with. The real problem is that it is so thin that it will
fade in color in a fairly short time (like a year or two,
perhaps) Silver and gold diffuse into each other a bit, even at
room temperature. so over time, silver can migrate through the
gold leaf, and the color you see at the surface of the leaf gets
paler and paler with time, as more and more silver makes it to
the outer surface, and gold gets diffused into the silver base.
I once did some pieces using Kum Boo made with ordinary thickness
gold foil, then roll printed to both press the already adheared
gold flush with the silver as well as bringing in a texture at
the same time. Then the thing got further assembled with easy
solder. Not much, but some heating. And then it got oxidized
with liver of sulphur. The key point here is that with just this
additional bit of heat from soldering the piece, sufficient
copper or more likely, silver, from the base sheet was able to
migrate through the gold enough so the liver of sulpher was able
to give the gold a wonderful series of oxidation colors. Pure
gold, of course, would not have done that at all. A quite
graphic demonstration of how much diffusion can take place even
with a foild, instead of leaf…
Peter Rowe