i made silver jewelry!

I took a 2-part class to learn how to make a metal clay ring (sterling silver 950) at the DIYCave. I’m embarrassed that it’s taken me over a year of teaching before I signed up for a class, but I’m glad I finally did! It was so fun, the instructor was great, and I enjoyed learning with a small group. Even though I had no idea what I was doing, I’m happy with my funky weird little pieces.

As someone who has never done any type of metal work, nor made jewelry outside of beading, I didn’t know metal clay even existed. Metal clay is what it sounds like—a clay made up of sterling silver particles, water, and binder. Since it’s a clay, you can form pieces the way you would normally build an object with clay. This sounded approachable to me as I’ve dabbled in ceramics and really enjoyed hand building pieces.

Metal clay is prone to drying out and cracking quickly—which might be specific to our environment here in the high desert in winter when hot air is constantly blowing on you to keep you warm. But, once your object is built, you let it dry (like greenware in ceramics), sand it and/or use slip to do any additional attachments and then it goes to the kiln.

We each had 10g of clay to make a piece from. I knew I wanted to make an organic shaped ring with some squiggles that would fit my very swole from climbing pointer finger. So, I made that piece first. Because metal clay shrinks once fired, I went up several sizes to achieve an 8 1/2 size ring. I didn’t take any photos of this stage of the work, I was too focused!

After, I had the other half of my metal clay and it didn’t feel like enough to set a larger stone in as a ring, so I made a very chunky pendant with a giant champaign pink stone. I’d been wanting a large, sparkly charm, but didn’t want to buy it online because it’s just hard to tell the size of things. So, I made it :) I totally winged it and was working fast as I didn’t want the clay to crack. I didn’t fully think through the best way to attach the bail to the charm, but it all worked out.

In between sessions, I was nervous my ring wouldn’t fit or that it would crack because that’s possible. We arrived for our second session, and our instructor had trued up our rings to our sizes (via hammering on a mandrel). I was surprised and glad that my ring fit. We spent the second session brushing and polishing our pieces—this is a lot of work by hand. Luckily, our instructor had a tumbler and the pieces were so shiny once they had tumbled for 10 minutes. We also tried torch firing with ss metal clay 990 (because 950 is kiln only due to higher silver content).

Our instructor kindly offered to kiln pieces for us—as I’m not quiet ready to buy a kiln. I’m looking forward to experimenting and making some more pieces! And, I’ll likely take more jewelry classes, maybe this metal clay pendant class in April.