Fiery Hearts Designs

Archive for April, 2009

I con­tin­ued to explore work­ing with pre­cious metal clay (PMC). totally untu­tored rely­ing on read­ing and try­ing, my pre­ferred learn­ing method. There are plenty of detailed instruc­tions both online and in mag­a­zines and books. I got some good results with this piece which included set­ting a cubic zir­co­nia in the sil­ver leaf. Zir­co­nia works beau­ti­fully in metal clay. I mis­judged the size of the piece and it is prob­a­bly a bit smaller than it should be in this necklace.

This piece was actu­ally unsuc­cess­ful. It was designed as a leaf with a bit of it bro­ken off. I then wrapped lemon Swarovski crys­tals on the leaf as mois­ture drops. It was intended to be a pin. How­ever, shortly after I photo graphed it I broke it. It turns out that I had made it too thin. So, lessons learned was that I made one too thick and one too thin and one on unsuit­able armi­ture. Okay, got it, this learn by doing method actu­ally works, but with the price of the medium ris­ing I decided I needed to be more care­ful and to work with mock­ups using poly­mer clay for my sil­ver clay pieces. The clay drys quickly and can be re-hydrated but it is difficult.

These ear­rings are favorites of mine. It took a while for me to decide to put them at the shop. I sel­dom make ear­rings and I really like these. They are called Twisted Rib­bon. 

So, this is my early tri­als with metal clay. I have a but­ter­fly in process now which I am mak­ing in pieces and will fuse them at the end and embell­ish with gold aura.

I will con­tinue to learn and now there is bronze clay to try. I really like mak­ing the sculp­tures in miniature.

In the pre­vi­ous post I men­tioned metal clay as one of the jew­elry media that I like work­ing with. One com­ment asked about it. This post chron­i­cles my first attempts with pre­cious metal clay (PMC). Metal clay seems to be a mis­take when one first hears of it.  Briefly, it is actual pow­dered met­als, most often sil­ver because of the cost but also gold and most recently bronze, mixed with clay and water. The clay can be molded, shaped, and carved then dried. It is then fired in a kiln or with a hand­held torch or small gas fired stove depend­ing on the type of clay. The clay burns away leav­ing ster­ling sil­ver or 14k gold. The clay can be com­bined with wire and with some very hard gem­stones. The ring at left, Twisted Twig Ring, is made from ster­ling sil­ver wire and pre­cious metal clay. The wire formed the basis for the ring and the clay, in the form of a paste, was used to fuse the wire. I pol­ished and shaped and sized the ring with filing.

How­ever, the ring was not my first effort with the PMC (which is also a spe­cific brand and type of the clay) My first efforts were a bit more hum­bling not to men­tion some wasted ster­ling sil­ver. My first effort was to cre­ate a free form sil­ver heart. My first effort used art wire as an arma­ture for the heart which was then cov­ered with the clay. 

The wire did not tol­er­ate the tem­per­a­tures of the fir­ing and the clay was not con­sis­tently thick in all parts of the heart. The result was that my artis­tic vision was achieved but it fell into sev­eral pieces which remain in my scrap sil­ver container.

The next effort, I sim­ply sculpted the heart free form with no arma­ture. That worked well, but I did not take into con­sid­er­a­tion that the shrink­age with metal clay is really very low. So, I used triple the a mount of clay that I actu­ally needed. The result was a heart about one inch by three quar­ters of an inch in dimen­sion. I embell­ished the top of the heart with clay extruded from a syringe so it did not take a high pol­ish (done fre­quently by tum­bling the sil­ver with steel pel­lets. The final result is a bit heavy but I threaded a mul­ti­color silk rib­bon through the chain and I enjoy wear­ing my Pi of Hearts.

More tomor­row.

I am expe­ri­enc­ing some dif­fi­culty in regain­ing a bit of focus regard­ing jew­elry designs. I have not done any­thing unique for months. I have been think­ing about pre­vi­ous designs, scan­ning my sup­ply sources, and sur­vey­ing all the lovely stones I have in my trove.

I want my designs to be unique, touch­able, beau­ti­ful to see and com­fort­able to wear. I want designs that endure the cur­rent fash­ion col­ors and styles so that it will not end up under a pile of newer things by the end of the year. Finally, I want each piece to have an owner out there unknown when I make it but who will ulti­mately find it and love it. In the case of com­mis­sions I really try to get a sense of the per­son so that the piece I make is uniquely her own.

I pre­fer organic and natures con­tri­bu­tions to com­po­nents such as the car­nelian ron­delle beads in this piece. I make some com­po­nents from metal clay, poly­mer clay, and sil­ver. I pur­chase most of the find­ings and of course the beads and cabo­chons. I also include odd items that I find in my trav­els. Some­times I take apart jew­elry pieces and reuse the com­po­nents in new designs.

I do not draw well (actu­ally my draw­ing is awful and I need to take a course) so most of my designs are devel­oped by rumag­ing through my sup­plies or a cat­a­log or sup­ply store along with men­tal activ­ity in the shower or the driver’s seat. Then I lay­out pieces and work with them. Some­times I use sub­sti­tute items to do mock­ups and some­times I just start all over.

When I do wire work I fre­quently use inex­pen­sive art wire to work out the design on a cabo­chon or other item that I might be wrap­ping. I use clay to mock up some pieces before using the fast-drying expen­sive sil­ver clay. I also wear jew­elry to make cer­tain it wears well, hangs prop­erly, and is com­fort­able. Some­times I sim­ply have to wait for a stone or other item to speak to me so that I can under­stand what it wants to become. Yeah, who knew I could be so woo woo.

Any­way, I need some crit­i­cal feed­back and direc­tion. So this is your oppor­tu­nity to weigh in. The piece in this post is inspired by a piece I bought years ago when I lived in Guam. That piece was lapis, multi-strand, no accent beads and a square pen­dant that was ori­ented sim­i­lar to this one. In fact that neck­lace was uncom­fort­able because of the spac­ers that had been used to align the strands so I took it apart and used all the com­po­nents in my own designs.

Back to this piece. It was one of the first neck­laces I sold at White Mist of Cot­ter. The per­son who bought it took it to Ten­nessee or Geor­gia and based on her feed­back to Julia it is one of her favorite neck­laces and a sta­ple in her busi­ness wardrobe. I love hear­ing that. I reworked this piece sev­eral times. I am not a fan of sym­me­try and avoid it when I can thus the design does not have match­ing accents but I do give a nod to sym­me­try with the place­ment of the accents. I also do not feel it nec­es­sary to use only one metal. I used brass, sil­ver, and pewter in this. I loved the col­ors. They are warm and reflect light. Car­nelian is one of my favorite stones to work with.

I do not expect you to give raves about this piece. What I am look­ing for is some crit­i­cal design feed­back. What does this piece tell you. Did I hit the mark based on my design goals?