so, I just noticed the deadline was not on the weekend, so i had best make some progress.

This is what I've got

The bright patina from last post has gone, and I'm back to the dark look again.

April Wilkerson's YouTube video looks like a good solution:  

Instead of seeding my salt with grains I went with a super salt brine of dubious proportions and just dipped the top in the salt brine and let it dry, then dipped it again.

I then sprayed the whole tree and base with household ammonia using a spray head from a carpet cleaner spray bottle (I rinsed it).

Hopefully I will get 2 different copper patinas from this method.

Then it dawned on me, just spraying the ammonia on there would expose the salt and copper to ammonia for a couple minutes if I was lucky.

Dang, so I dumped the brine out of the pitcher and threw in the plastic box i used to elevate the tree in the copper sulfate solution, put the tree on top and put in a couple glugs of ammonia, avoiding splashing the tree. The ammonia should hop out of the water and fill the top of the pitcher with ammonia that will stick around.

Oh right, covering it...

Aluminum foil is an easy but wrong answer. I don't have the plastic wrap and rubber band option that is clearly superior. I went with press and seal plastic wrap.

I also put the pitcher under a bright light with moderate predictable temperature profile:

The plastic should elevate the temperature some having the effect of increasing the interactions with the copper.

Also, quicken loans is telling me to do situps I think.

If you zoom in may will see the ammonia in the pitcher shows blue because I failed to rinse the plastic box when i removed it from the copper sulfate and put it in the pitcher.

Will check back later.