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.