Grrrrrrrrrrrrr, sometimes hindsight is brilliant!

One of the things I love about silver metal clay is that you can see a piece of jewellery made from a different medium and adapt it to metal clay HOWEVER with that learning sometimes comes a better understanding! 

I found a jewellery artist called E. Douglas Wunder and absolutely fell head over heels in love with his work.  He works with sheet metals (titanium, stainless steel, silver etc) and uses a multi layer construction to achieve the most stunning industrial, geometrical designs.  So, armed with some clay, I decided to see if I could interpret one of his pendants. 

I knew I didn't want to add too many layers as this would be a waste of clay (although afterwards I realised I could have added one more to the rear of the pendant to make it nicer looking from the back).  This was very tricky to construct actually - more difficult than I had anticipated and trying to get the design to work wasn't as easy as I thought it was going to be.

I have to admit that I was so pleased that it fired and was in one piece and looked good BUT one of the things I'm taking away from this is that fine Silver may be just a little bit too soft for this type of design.  So, if I make anything like this again, I'll definitely use a mix of Sterling and Fine Silver to give me a more robust finish.  This will stand up to wear but it can be bent by hand out of shape so I think going for a stronger option in the future will be a good idea.

I've had my head down thinking about what I wanted to learn to do when I first started working with clay and realised that firing items were important ESPECIALLY I wanted somebody to hold my hand when torch firing!  So with that in mind I decided to sit down and think about a pendant that could be made, combining copper and silver clay so that I could demonstrate both working with a torch and then how to fire in a kiln. 

I made two pendants and the one that was most effective and certainly "do-able" was the bee pendant.  So this is going to be the subject of a workshop and I'm really looking forward to this one.