There's a First Time For Everything.....

OK, here it is - the grand unveiling of my first attempt with precious metal clay.

It turned out okay, but nothing spectacular. It was a fun learning process and I'm ready to create my next jewelry piece with PMC. Here's just a little run down of the process.... I'm going to chronicle this for you in pictures..... here I rolled out the clay to 3 cards thick.

I did learn very quickly that you have to put a moisturizer or oil on your hands (I used Slik) or else the clay sticks and dries out very quickly. After rolling out the clay I cut it into two rectangles and then stamped my image into the clay. Pretty complicated so far don't you think....but wait, it will get much more exciting...I hope you can keep up.

Here comes the exciting part.....I let the pieces dry overnight. After they had dried I sanded them a little bit, but here's where I made my first mistake - I didn't sand them as much as I should have. Silly me, I thought that with the heat and the silver merging into a solid mass that a miracle would happen and it would somehow smooth itself out. Well, that is a mistake I won't make again.

Anyway, I was overly excited to fire them so I did it on a windy day because every day the wind would blow and I got tired of waiting. So I opened all the windows in the house and set up my SpeedFire Cone System next to the door so the possible fumes would be sent outside rather than staying inside and causing who knows what kind of damage to my noodle.

After what I'll just call a "little windy incident" and hearing a "tinkle tinkly tink" metal sound on the tile I figured out that the pieces were fired. After my heart stopped pounding I picked them up off the tile floor and put them on a plate to cool. I knew that there would be a white film on the silver, however, I had no idea that they would look similar to the way they looked before they were fired.

I did like the look of the silver after I burnished them with a soft

brass brush. The earring on the left is how it looked after firing, the earring on the right has been burnished. Since I was trying to learn I decided I wanted to polish them. This is when I learned that I definitely should have made them as smooth as possible before firing them. I had to sand and sand and then sand some more to get the backs smooth. It was my intent to polish them to a mirror finish. So after sanding I used the polishing papers to get them smooth and shiny.

Then it was on to the tumbler. I threw them in the tumbler and an hour later VOILA! my first pair of shiny silver earrings. I turned the corners over to add a little flare to them.