What tools and materials do I need to make silver metal clay jewellery?

Silver metal clay is a wonderful, accessible and creative medium for making silver jewellery which requires minimal tools and materials in order to get started, and therefore can easily be made from home.

So if you’d like to try working with silver metal clay to see what its like, then this blog post covers all the basics tools and materials for making jewellery (plus some extras) so you know exactly what you need, what it is called and what it’s used for.

Materials

First of all, you will need to buy some clay. There are different brands of silver metal clay to choose from, but we’d recommend starting with Art Clay Silver. You can buy clay in 5g, 10g, 20g or 50g packs depending on how much clay you want to use in your design.

Essential Tools

You really don’t need a huge amount of tools to get started thankfully, so here are the essential ones which will enable you to experiment a little and make some clay pieces:

  • A Teflon sheet to use as a mat for rolling out the clay

  • A plastic roller

  • Playing cards to use as spacers when rolling out the clay (you can also buy spacers)

  • Badger balm or olive oil for greasing the area you’ll be working on so that the clay doesn’t stick to everything

  • A blow torch

  • A fire brick for firing your pieces on

  • Tweezers for picking up hot pieces after firing

  • Clingfilm to wrap your remaining clay and keep it moist

  • Silver clay paste for adding elements or repairing cracks ( you can make your own using a small bit of silver clay too)

Optional tools

The following tools aren’t essential but will come in handy as your skills and design ambitions develop:

  • Pin vice for drilling holes

  • Paint brush for dusting whilst sanding or using to wet the clay

  • Agate burnisher for polishing your silver clay piece once fired

  • Brass bristle brush - which is used for first stage of polishing

  • 3M Polishing papers - from coarse to fine for getting a lovely finish on your piece

  • Rubber block for supporting your work when sanding or polishing

  • Tapered wooden ring mandrel - if you want to make rings

  • Ring sizer

  • Needle tool - for pushing down stones and for cutting when using with stencils

  • Moulds and/or moulding compound to make your own moulds

  • Texturing sheets or items that can be used for texturing such as lace or leaves

  • Cookie cutters - for cutting out different shapes

  • Glanol for a final polish

  • Baby wipes for cleaning up your area

  • Hot plate for drying your clay pieces quickly

  • A barrel polisher - which will save you some time polishing when you have lots of pieces to polish

Where to buy

All of these tools can be sourced from a range of places such as Metal Clay Ltd in the UK, Kernowcraft, Cookson and in the USA from Cool Tools and Rio Grande. You can also buy metal clay supplies on Amazon.


 
 

Learn more on our ONE YEAR ONLINE DIPLOMA IN SILVER METAL CLAY

If you would love to learn how to make jewellery from this magic material do check out our one year online Diploma in Silver Metal Clay. Click the button below to find out what you could achieve.