Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
From beginner to expert it's all here today on Beads, Baubles and Jewels.
Stephanie Girdlestone is here from Fire Mountain Gems & Beads
and she's here to teach us how to work with metal clay. Stephanie, this is
something that I like looking at the final product but
I'm a little nervous about getting into. Are you going to make it
easy? I'm going to make it very easy, don't you worry about it.
Just like you used to play with clay when you're a kid, you just want to
roll it up into a ball to begin.
And this is a metal clay. This is ninety nine point nine percent pure
silver. That is silver? It looks like clay. That's exactly what it is and the clay
burns off and it has the silver molecules inside of it. Then the heat of
the kiln or the torch is what activates it to become pure silver.
So it's really great for people who have metal allergies that
can't wear sterling, because they don't have all the other alloys like nickle.
What's the first step? First thing is we are going to roll it into a ball
already done and I'm just going to lay it here, on a teflon sheet
on top of a ceramic tile, just to give myself a nice firm surface to roll it on.
I'm using this acrylic roller that has two O-rings which I just bought at the
hardware store and that is simply so that the rolled clay does not get too thin.
When it does get too thin,
it makes it difficult to fire. That's a very good tip.
We're just going to go ahead and roll it out and you can see you need
to push *** it to get it to go.
Sometimes it'll stick a little bit and what you can do is put a
little bit of olive oil on the roller and that will actually help. So I'll just
hold it with my fingers to make it a little bit easier.
I like to turn it sideways so you get a nice flat surface. Don't be afraid to get
your fingers very gooey with this. It's kind of a dive in thing.
Really we're working with metal, not with clay and you
have to expect to get dirty. It doesn't
matter that it's kind of an unusual shape. What we are doing is using this rubber
stamp and I want
the shape of the rubber stamp today, so I'm using the back of the
rubber block to get the shape of the pendant.
Using a utility knife, I'm just quickly cutting the clay out.
I'm going to go around all four sides which is really easy.
There I go.
Now I have the shape and
I'm going to turn my rubber stamp over and I'm going to imprint the shape into the
clay.
Now remember, when you're using rubber stamps, you want nice even pressure.
Don't rock from side to side. You want to make sure and put both hands into it,
like you're doing.
Again, don't be afraid to apply that pressure and get this clay real dirty.
You can see that it comes out really nice. The last thing is simply using a
regular coffee stirrer to make a hole in the corner.
Be careful on that as you want to get fairly close to the edge but not too
close because you are going to fire it. Can you reuse that excess?
Absolutely, you would just pull it away from here and just use it for something
else. So once that's done, then we're going to let this dry.
There's a couple of ways to let it dry, you can do it just overnight by
setting it on your stove top or on your countertop and let it dry. You can
put it out in the sun.
We can also use a dehydrator. It is kind of the preferred method, it's efficient, it's
constant heat and circles around the piece at all times, so that's really great.
When you get it dry like this, then you can look at and say
"Is it the right shape? Do I want to shape it a little different?"
Now's the time to do that while it's still there.
We're just going to use a regular nail block that you would buy at
the drugstore or jeweler files. If you had any extra clay in the hole, you could use a
little file to clean it out, like something that you would use to file your nails with.
We are using the rubber block again. You want to be kind of gentle with it, as it
is still clay, but we want that nice stability and that's why I have it
on the block.
I look at it and say "You know it's not really popping for me", "it's not
really working", so I'm going to embellish it just a little bit more. Another
product that I have,
let me do it this way,
is a syringe. This is a really great product that comes prepackaged with the
clay in it.
So you don't have to put that in there, that is great.
I told you it would be easy.
It has three nozzle sizes, this is the largest nozzle that it comes with and
it leaves
just a line of clay.
And you see you start it little bit.
This is much like cake decorating where you want to lay the clay out as opposed to
just laying it flat.
So I went ahead and I did that on this piece already and I dried it
again to make sure everything was real dry. It's
very important it's completely dry because when you go to use the kiln
or the torch on the piece, it can actually break apart if there are any
air bubbles or if it's not completely dry.
At this stage we are ready to use the torch
and the torch that you see here is just a regular butane torch that
you can buy the butane for it anywhere.
And the most important thing with the torch really is just to remember
consistent heat. Keep it at the same level all the time on the piece, evenly firing
it, waiting for it to get up to a fiery red color, then go about another three
minutes and it's ready to go. Safety measures include don't
touch it when it's hot; wear your safely goggles and things
like that. So you have to be real careful with that.
The kiln, again, is the preferred method, constant heat and
does it really nicely.
What does it look like when it comes out .What it's
going to look like is this little white
piece of metal
and actually what this is, is covered with the residue from the clay.
You can tell it got a deeper, whiter kind of look to it.
Very much so.
And you use just a fine wire brush to get that off.
I will show you again, using the rubber block for stability and a little bit of
pressure. Remember don't be afraid to get dirty.
You can see that I'm just taking that right off the top and it's becoming
silver now that it's turned into in the firing process.
Perfect!
You can see the difference right like that. Now once we've got all of that off of
there, I could look at it again and say, "am I happy with that?"
Do I want to shine it up a bit, use a little sand paper? You can
tumble it in a rock tumbler. The ring that I'm wearing was actually tumbled in a
regular rock tumbler.
Let's look at some of the other things you brought, Stephanie.
Some of them are made with many different techniques, there's a texture plate,
a mold that we've used, the syringe, a
lot of different ways to use this product. That's great. Thank you Stephanie.
Today in our beading lesson, Katie helps you to assemble your very
own jewelry toolbox.