Jumping off the cliff into the sea of jewelry making!

I love being creative and to be honest I get bored easily!  The thing I love about pottery is that there is endless different ways you can use clay.Just recently I have taken up jewelry making.  I don't usually wear jewelry, to speak of and have never made anything beyond a stretchy bracelet with kids. So I felt a bit out of my element in the jewelry making isle at Micheal's.  Actually, I went to Micheal's a month earlier and the selection overwhelmed me so much so that I didn't buy anything. So this last time that I was there, I did quite a bit of research ahead of time, although I still felt I was jumping off a cliff.  Not a big cliff mind you, just a $200., cliff. which by now has grown to $300-$400 because if you don't know what you are doing you kind of need a bit of everything.  Thankfully I didn't need to buy beads!

Here is a picture of some of the pendants I made.  I first rolled out the clay and then stamped the clay with some rubber stamps.  You need to first sprinkle the clay with corn starch, to do this I put some corn starch in an old sock and when I tap the clay with it a little comes out.  For these pendants I made holes using the kemper hole punch and I also used high fire wire.  I wasn't sure how the wire would work but they all turned out except for one that cracked.

In this picture you can see how I fired the pieces that I glazed.  You need to use high fire wire and something else I learned the hard way, you need to have some weight on top of the wire or it will slump and your pendants with fuse to the kiln shelve.

For a lot of my pendants I decorated them with underglaze so I wouldn't have to high fire the pendants leaving them somewhat porous so they can be used for essential oils.

The bird and the feather, in this necklace are made with a brown clay with grog, it is a sculpting clay.  I wanted to be able to paint it with underglaze and then be able to sand it to reveal the brown clay; i was going for the rustic look.

My bird is a bit big but hey I will get better.

We have a few peacocks, two are under a year old so I don't know yet if they are male or female.  Just the males produce these beautiful amazing feathers.  Each fall they lose their feather and they grow back over the winter; so I have an endless supply.  We also have chickens in all different colors, I may have to raid the coop,lol!

Each of these pendants have only been fired to bisque 05, meaning they are still somewhat porous, I have done that so they could be used for essential oils.

The yellow bead in this picture is also clay but has been glazed.

To create the rough edges on these pendants I actually ripped the clay, like you would a piece of paper.

I have also been soldering some of my broken pottery which I will share in a future post.