Fiery Heart Designs

Author Archive

I have fin­ished my rework of the web­site. I have a new kiln and a new stu­dio to go with it. I have 750 grams of clay includ­ing sil­ver, cop­per, bronze and white bronze. I have so many design ideas it has been trou­bling me where to start. However, I do have two promised pieces to work on so per­haps that will be my first start. I do have a copper/silver alloy pen­dant to post about later this week.

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Wish I had pho­tos of my exper­i­ments in cop­per clay but my first fir­ing was dis­ap­point­ing. I either did not quite get the fir­ing sched­ule or I mis-applied it. Either way no joy. First I broke the piece which was one of my funny styl­ized heart shapes in out­line form. Without think­ing as I held it while prepar­ing to place it for fir­ing I squeezed a bit and it fell into three pieces. Since it was just a piece for test fir­ing I sim­ply used one piece to fire.…failure.…then after check­ing the man­ual, adjusting.…a sec­ond piece. More fail­ure. It was late. Since then I read an arti­cle about fir­ing this type of cop­per clay and will try again this week with a more sub­stan­tial piece.

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Well, my new stu­dio is 90% com­pleted and I am mov­ing in. Plenty of changes to tell about includ­ing a new loca­tion show­ing my jew­el­ery and some new and won­der­ful artist friends. I will be back soon to tell all the news. Meanwhile enjoy this peek into my stu­dio.

My sta­ple always-sell pieces are bracelets using mem­ory wire, a stiff wire that retains its cir­cu­lar shape,and beads. For some rea­son women really love them and are will­ing to pay $35 to $50 for one. They are com­fort­able and easy to wear. The tech­nique for mak­ing the bracelets is very easy and usu­ally takes about two hours. Simply cut the wire, make a loop with pli­ers at one end, slide the beads onto the wire, fin­ish with another loop. The real work is in cre­at­ing a one of a kind unique piece each time.

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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.

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