Tag: Hanger

From Clay to Silver – Part 2

So the next day I came home late after work and we started finishing the piece I was making. This involved a lot of sanding, with minute files, and increasingly finer sandpaper. The idea is that every flaw and crease you get out before firing you don’t have to sand once it is finished. So while I was working on the flower everything went alright. I got it sanded to where I wanted it and that was all fine. But then I got to work on the little stem like bit the rose was going to be attached to. It went fine for quite some time, but eventually I accidentally broke the loop of. However my aunt insisted that we could glue it back on and it would not be too much of a problem. So after sanding both bits and deciding it was good enough we wetted the ends of the break and added a little silver clay from a syringe, and stuck the bits together again. I used a brush to spread the clay as far as possible as to reduce the amount of sanding that was needed. We popped it in the over at 100 degrees so it was well dried before I sanded everything off that needed to go. And then we stuck the flower to the stem bit. Again same method with dampening the bits where I wanted them to stick together and then adding some syringe stuff. It fitted perfectly. Popped it the oven again and then syringed the back to make it one piece for added strength. Sanded and sanded and sanded until I was fed up and we decided it was fine.

Then the exiting bit. Filling the sink with water in preparation. Then we placed a mesh over the cooker hob and turned it on after we put the hanger on it. Turned the lights of and saw it glowing red. Counted down 2 minutes and then put it in the cold water to cool. When we took it out it was white, but my aunt grabbed a little steel brush and made me brush.. and from underneath the white came very shiny silver!

I was so incredibly surprised and happy, I couldn’t sleep for another hour after I finished sanding it and using an agate to make it shine even more. I’m so happy with it.

I hope you like it as much as I do! I’d like to hear of your adventures with silver clay, some day!

Finished Silver Hanger
Finished Silver Hanger!

From Clay to Silver – Part 1

My aunt is visiting us this week, she’s come by boat from England and is staying with us until tomorrow night. Last week she asked me if I would like it if she brought her silver clay with her. Silver clay is a strange substance made of 92 (I think) percent silver, some water and some binder. So it looks and feels like clay but is ridiculously expensive. Anyway so she came along and brought some here so we could play with it.

So first we had to decide what we were going to make, I got my little bag of jewellery stuff and started looking at the things I liked. Eventually after looking at my stuff and liking the following three (the two right ones are the same but front and back). I selected the most right one to try and see if I could make something similar and then we started playing with fimo.

Hand Flower Front Side Back Side

I have a big box of fimo and I’ve done quite a lot of things with fimo before, so I started playing with making roses. Eventually I settled on a rose design with a sort of loop around it, like a rose in the middle of the hanger to the right. Once we unpacked the silver clay, I found out that it is really sticky but also dries out extremely quickly. In the end I tried wrapping cling film around my fingers and that sort of worked. The first attempts at the rose were not so good, my usual technique of squishing bits flat into petal shapes failed miserably because of the stickiness. So in the end we decided to do a long petal in the middle and once I had that I added three petals to the sides. So now I had a rose. (Saying it like this makes it sound very easy but sometimes it was tough)

So then we attempted the snakelike thing around it, but the clay dried out so we couldn’t make the loop at the top, so we tried again, and again eventually it worked and we were very relieved, they even fit together nicely in the end. Well that was the first night. We needed another night to sand it, stick it together, ‘glue’ it and sand some more.

But that is a story for another day (say tomorrow if I remember writing it). I think I’m liking this new craft!