PICASSO Pendants

I wanted to show you a few of the Picasso pendants I recently listed in my Etsy shop. These are from the original firing. My second piece sits waiting to be cut up into pendants ... but I've been so busy working with clay. My first bisque firing of white clay pieces is done, and I just unloaded it to make room for red clay pieces. HELP! Anyway ... here are the pendants.

These last two pendants were fused a second time as an experiment, and I really like the effect!

Fired Picasso Pieces

I'm soooo pleased with these pieces. I was not expecting them to have this beautiful shine. I'll add bails now ... and start another batch soon!

Raku-Fired Pendants .... Finally!

Remember the clay heart-shaped pendants I made .... way back in November?!! Today I finally got three posted into my RoseMarysClay Etsy shop. I can't explain why I don't have enough time in the day to do everything on my list (... I know ... it's because my list is several pages long). But I had a very productive day yesterday. I fired a batch of dichroic glass pendants that I'll have to reshape and then fire polish in the next few days, AND I got the three raku pendants done this morning. My bails are kind of funky, but then so are the pendants. They are made with copper wire which I dunked in liver of sulfur this morning. And instead of chains, I decided to use black leather cord with a lobster clasp closure.

Here are the three pendants close up. The last photo shows a photo of a pendant with the leather cord.

I also listed this dichroic fused glass heart in my RoseMarysGlassArt Etsy shop today. It's a winner!

Raku-Fired Pendants

Here are just a few of the raku-fired clay pendants I've been working on for this weekend's ceramics sale. I think I have 15 done so far. For most of them I added leather cords that are adjustable in length, and a few have metals chains. For the next batch I want to add my lampwork beads, but that will have to wait for next week when there's more time. So much fun ... so little time ...

Pendants .... Galore!!

I started making pendants using the extra slab-rolled pieces of clay that got cut off my baking dishes. So much fun! I think I have a 3 to 4 year inventory. The photos below don't show ALL of them.

Here are a few that are drying.

Some more that have been bisque fired.

I had a disturbing thought one night. I had used copper wire on several of the hearts and wondered, "What is the melting temperature of copper?", as I had planned to use my newly bought bead holder contraption with these pendants in my next cone 10 firing. The melting point of copper is 1981 deg. F., so cone 10 was out of the question. Raku firing these was the alternative plan .... Yay! I love to raku and couldn't wait to begin.

I glazed the pieces and used the two baskets I had built for little pieces like these. Originally they served quite well to fire my raku whistles.

This one is made of a couple layers of metal mesh -- I think it was called hardware cloth. Would it go through one more firing?

This one is made from metal parts and held together with nuts and bolts. Both baskets have nichrome wire for the handle, allowing the tongs to lift the basket from the kiln to the can safely.

I got my can ready with strips of newspaper and a little bit of sawdust.

I got my raku tongs ready, along with long raku gloves and my face shield that protects me when I open that 1800 deg. F. kiln door. This shield was such a good purchase. It has a protective coating of gold that is heat tolerant. You honestly don't feel heat through it!

Well, the firings went sooo well, but the wire mesh basket fell apart in the raku can. Luckily it waited until then and not as it was being lifted out of the kiln! So I can't show you that after-photo of pendants. But the metal basket held together fine and here's a photo of those pieces. The copper wire was beautiful. I decided to make some more pendants using steel wire so that I could use my new bead holder in the cone 10 firing. But after I finished them, I decided to raku them too. The steel wire turned black, but I like the way it looks.

I'm looking forward to finishing a few of these pieces with leather cords and chains, maybe some swirls and lampwork beads. I'll post a few as soon as I can. But first -- Cooking delicious recipes for Thanksgiving is first on the agenda. Then on Friday and Saturday, while the weather is in the mid-70's, glazing for my cone 10 firing is second on the agenda.

Everyone, have a most wonderful Thanksgiving Day. Hope you get to enjoy it with family and friends.

New Dichroic Fused Glass Pillow Pendants

I've had a few new ceramic molds for a few weeks that were designed to make fused glass pendants. Each mold makes 5 or 6 pieces and they were originally to be used with glass frit. The latest instruction from the company showed you could cut dichroic glass pieces according to the templates provided and use them instead. Here's a photo of the mold. You can see there is a little "nipple" in each depression.

You put the cut dichroic pieces in each depression and fire the kiln according to instructions. What happens is that because of the "nipple", your glass now has a little "mountain" on it that has to be ground off.

The grinding was easy and worked out well. So then pieces were cleaned, placed back in their places in the mold, and covered with clear frit. But WAIT! First each piece was weighed on a gram scale, and that weight was recorded. Then enough frit was weighed separately to meet the weight specifications on the instructions. Carefully the frit was poured over each piece and leveled. Then the second firing was done.

I finished these three pieces with leather cords, sterling silver beads and sterling silver clasps. I added them to my Etsy shop this morning and am anxious to see how much attention they get!

Precious Metal Clay (PMC) Classes

I finished my second PMC class yesterday, having taken the first one a couple months ago. Something sparked my interest this time, but I still felt very inadequate when working with the stuff. And I felt the teacher picked on me! Seriously, she was trying to correct all the things I was doing wrong, but I noticed I was the one in class with the most problems! But at the end of the day, I felt I had learned and improved. And I want to continue working with PMC.

The PMC classes were taught by Lora Hart. She is a wonderful teacher and I really recommend her. She is quite famous and highly qualified in the PMC field. Check out her blog and learn more about her. The blog has a wealth of information and a long list of jewelry artist sites. Unfortunately Lora said she would be moving to the East Coast next year.  I'll take a few more classes from her before she leaves.
http://lorahartjewels.blogspot.com/

Here's a photo of the two pieces I made in my classes. The first is the heart pendant with the TOO large bail. I guess I can always replace the bail with another later. What was interesting about making the heart was the texture on it. After the heart dried, we used a template with a cut out pattern and spread PMC slip on the template with a knife, like Spackle. Then carefully lifted the template off. The slip remained as a raised decoration. That has tons of possibilities!

The heart was treated with Black Max. I don't like the look. I'll remove it and try liver of sulfur.

The hinged piece wasn't what I expected to make at all. I thought we would be making a pendant that closed. This one does not close and was never intended to close. But now I know how to make a hinge out of PMC and will figure out how to make a closed one later. I added two jump rings to which I will add silver chain. In class Lora asked me how I was going to hang this piece. I said I would drill holes after it was fired. She dragged me to her work table, took out a twist drill and said I HAD TO DRILL THE HOLES NOW!! She very quickly twisted the small drill bit by hand into one corner of my piece.  Then told me to do the second hole. It worked. Nothing cracked. The hole was clean. It's something you would not do with dry stoneware clay .... it would crack. So I learned how strong PMC was. She also showed me dry PMC could be cut with a blade and it didn't crack.  Wow.

Have you had any experiences with PMC you'd like to share?