A Peek at the Process
My work board with various leaves I foraged from my garden and around our creek. I ended using the grape (top middle) in this picture for my grape leaf pendants.
Inspiration
I’m usually inspired by nature. Leaves and flowers are my favorite to work with in natural form or to make from my imagination. When you’re working with organic pieces like leaves, texture is so very important. Every piece starts out from a small lump of clay that I have to shape and work into it’s final design.
Did you know that silver metal clay is recycled and considered green? It was originally developed to recycle film supplies in the early 90’s. All of my scraps are reused as well.
Refining
It takes time to ensure each piece is just right. I go in and hand file, sand and carve to make sure every detail stands out as it should. This process can take days. Once I feel satisfied with the piece, off to my kiln it goes!
You can see some of the dust from filing on these pieces! The strawberry leaf on the bottom has a hole cut out to set a little Marquis style stone and at the time I was debating on adding a bezel set stone to the grape leaf.
FIre Her Up!
Here’s my baby! Once each piece is finished, I fire them up in my kiln! The binder in the metal clay burns off and it the piece sinters together. This creates a fully bonded, completely pure metal piece of jewelry.
If I am working with base metals like copper, bronze, steel, etc. then it requires a trickier process. Rather than placing it on a shelf on the kiln, it must be fired in a container filled with carbon in a fussy multi-step process.
This process can take anywhere from a few hours, to a couple days depending on if I need to add something to the piece and re-fire.
Polishing -
The same batch of jewelry from above after having a LoS Patina applied, and polishing is complete.
Each piece is hand polished on my jeweler’s flex shaft. Afterwards, I typically add a patina to darken the pieces. This helps make the little details pop. I then go back in and polish off the excess and then start the process of hand polishing with finishing papers.
It took me approximately 2-3 hours per piece in the picture below.