Fiery Heart Designs

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.