Occasionally I have an urge to make jewellery. Usually earrings as they are simple and don’t take up too much silver. Most of you will know that I mostly use metal clay because of the versatility and ease in creating the shape that you want. The great thing about the silver metal clay is that they are extracted from old electronic parts so it’s effectively recycled, thus being an eco friendly product!
You can buy a lot of different stencils and stamps to create the pattern but I tend to create these stencils myself. After all, I don’t really see the point in buying something that you will probably only use once. I rather dig around the recycling bin and find bits of plastic to use as a stencil.
This was what I done on my recent project. As there was a birthday coming up, I decided to make a pair of earrings of a heart hanging on the hook. My intention was to make these cute hearts enamelled with red glass. As silver metal clay is very expensive, I needed to ensure that the correct amount is used to avoid wastage. To do this, I created a stencil with hearts cut out from a plastic lid from a soup pot. The size of the heart cut out allowed me to estimate the amount of metal clay required in each heart before being pressed and flatten to create the hearts.
Once the shapes have dried, they popped out easily for me to file the edges and punch the holes.
After throughly drying it with a hair dryer, I popped it into the kiln and an hour and a half later, the hearts were done. Initially I used transparent red glass but the effect was very disappointing. It came out a dirty yellow so I added opaque red glass powder instead. The results were surprisingly good as the glass not only fused properly but left an outline around the red opaque enamel.
With the complicated bits completed, all I needed to do was to hang the hearts on the hooks, polish it up and it’s all set to be wrapped up but not until I take some pretty pictures of the results.
For some strange reason, the earrings remind me of cherries, maybe because it is cherry season here in UK. Anyway, I hope the receiver will love this little gift. It didn’t take long to make them but I made sure a lot of love went into it.
Stephen Yong 