Everyone who works
in retail, or selling goods in general, knows the weeks and months
following Christmas are notoriously slow. There are all kinds of
methods and tricks to drum up business while all your customers
are shopped out from the holidays. I am not exempt from this, I
fall right into that category. So, what is the best way to utilize
this lull in sales? Do I just wait around for things to pick up?
NO! Time is valuable! I won't go so far as to say "time is money", but time has value and should not be wasted!
With the money I
made during my fall shows and over Christmas I was able to invest in
learning a new skill set. I purchased a number of tools and
materials to start working with precious metal clay or, PMC for
short. I coworker of mine first mentioned it to me some time ago, I
was flabbergasted that such a thing existed! Here’s the basics of
PMC: It’s clay, just like the clay used to make pottery, except
instead of being made up of tiny dirt particles, it’s made up of
tiny metal particles, a binder, and water. You can sculpt this clay
into virtually anything you want and let it dry. Once its dry, you
can fire it in a kiln or with a torch. The binder burns away and the metal particles fuse together to leave you with a solid piece of metal. How cool is that?!
Here's what the firing
process looks like, if you look carefully you can see the flames
coming off the pieces as the binder burns away.
I’ve been wanting
to compile (and create) a wedding collection for some time now. With
the after Christmas lull, and wedding season fast approaching, it
seemed the perfect time to get to work on it! I already have a few
pieces that are ‘wedding worthy’, but I really wanted to create
some truly spectacular pieces! By combining metal clay with my other
skills, the possibilities are virtually endless!
My first, very
ambitious, piece was a tiara. I’ve never made a tiara, but brides
love them so why not give it a shot? I love using nature in my work
and I love the Art Nouveau style with all its gracefully curving
lines. So I decided to create a tiara using silver leaves made with PMC. Metal
clay shrinks when you fire it, in general your finished piece will be
about 15% smaller than what you started with. Some might see this as
a limitation or annoyance, but it can be quite useful! By making a
mold of a finished piece, and using it to create a duplicate, that
duplicate will end up being slightly smaller than the original after
firing. By employing this molding method, you can create a series of
identical pieces, each consistently smaller than the one before.
Above, are the two leaves I started with.
Here are all six leaves, each made from a mold of the one larger. Each time you copy a piece, you inevitably loose some of the detail, kind of like when you make a photocopy of a photocopy, and then make a photocopy of that copy, eventually you loose the image. With each generation of leaf I had to go back and add in details that were lost in the process, but this is easily done! The resulting set of leaves were perfect! After creating a wire frame, and soldering the leaves (with difficulty) to the frame, I had my tiara, and it was spectacular!
There is something
really wonderful in creating something you didn't think you were capable of creating. It's a feeling of accomplishment like no other.
The tiara is
wonderful, but necklaces are really what I love, and what I sell the
most of. I needed a jaw dropping necklace. A necklace that could serve as a centerpiece for my social media accounts and my Etsy shop. I wanting something that would catch peoples eye! When I first began working with PMC I made a ton of these tiny
leaves for a design that ended up not really working, so I set to work
trying to figure out what else I could do with them. It’s these
designs, that come about from another failed design, or from
accidentally purchasing the wrong thing, that end up being some of my best work. What I ending up doing with those tiny leaves was solder them onto wires and twist them together to create this statement necklace that is truly wedding worthy!
This then led to a
different version with little primrose blooms:
Once I'd started creating in this vein of design I couldn't stop, I was loving my new new creations!
I’ve been hard at
work creating this wedding collection, and it is by no means
complete! With wedding season upon us, if you are planning a
wedding, or know someone who is, take a look, and find something that
will make you feel amazing and beautiful on your wedding day!
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