Art Clay® Silver Border Mold Ring

hi and welcome to the Fire Mountain Gems and beads jewelry making studio I'm Lisa Pavelka and today I'm going to show you how to make this fun and flirty fine silver ring using art clay silver I'm even going to show you how you can add an optional gemstone so that you can bring your project up a notch and it all begins with 10 grams of art clay silver and my simple elegance border mold you're also going to need some basic supplies and tools for working with metal clay and we'll be covering those as we go through each step a little tip though you can start with polymer clay and do a dry run with your project polymer clay never dries out unlike metal clays which dry very very quickly and need a little special attention when you handle them when you work with polymer clay you can know that you have every tool and material right where you need it so you have your proverbial ducks in a row it's really important so what we're going to start with is some Teflon nonstick sheeting and we want to use a release agent this is going to keep our clay from sticking to our tools or board or mold our hands and we're going to use this silk baby this is really nice and a cosmetic sponge so just be real generous with it and and load up your sponge and you're going to take a roller and just lightly coat the roller you're also going to just lightly go over you should still have enough on your sponge lightly go over your Teflon sheeting we'll get this out of the way and we're going to use the boarder mold so I'm going to use this decorative one right here let's see kind of a baroque filigree kind of effect so that's ready we also want to have a clay blade at hand so we're going to lightly coat both sides of our clay blade so that doesn't stick as well and we'll set that aside for now and we're going to set this aside for now now to make sure we get a uniform thickness with our clay we need to use these slats designed for metal clay and they actually work for polymer clay so if you don't have your pasta machine yet those of you are working with polymer clay these are really handy to control thickness when you roll out clay in uniform sheets so the package will give you a guideline of how thick each of these are but I'm going to go with the one millimeter thick slats and those are the blue ones you'll have a little diagram on the package it comes with so we can set the other ones aside for now and we're going to space them apart because we're going to roll our clay between here and that's going to give us a uniform thickness I don't want to fill the entire cavity up of my boarder mold because it's a little thicker than I'd like my ring to be so that's why we're going to roll out a uniform sheet now when you open your metal clay you don't want to open it until you're ready to use it and it's also a good idea to lubricate your hands with a little of that cool slip and you'd like to have some cling wrap or food wrap standing by I like to use a double thick layer and I always work with my metal clay in the saran wrap or food wrapper it doesn't matter what brand it is but I work with it inside of that to keep the air off of it because as I said earlier it dries very quickly so when we're ready we open up the package and there's an outer package that keeps it sealed and there's some instructions inside so if you're new to metal clay you might refer to those too in addition to what I'm going to teach you about but we don't need those for now then you've got a second wrap and this helps keep the shelf-life of the clay a little bit longer you've got about a year or two that you need to use your metal clay up in when you when you purchase it you can tell it's still real good when it you can squish it through the package so there's a little notches here we're going to just tear that and there's yet another inner wrapper so the easiest way to get this out and to get all the metal clay out of the wrapper because we don't want to waste a bit of it this is pure silver sports although otherwise known as fine silver is you want to find the seam there and just pull it apart gently it should they should separate easily and you want to try to handle the clay as little as possible with your bare hands because it's going to stick to your fingers the metal clay and we want to conserve and you every little bit of this that we have so we want to condition it I'm going to fold it over on itself inside the wrapper now sometimes when you get your metal clay it's super fresh and it's a little bit more moist than you'd like it to be if you find it's sticking to the wrap and your tools even when you use your cool slip you can go ahead and just open it up for just a few seconds and fold it up again and check it to make sure it doesn't stick to your wrap if it's a little bit older it might need a little a little bit of hydration and we'll talk about how we rehydrate our clay if it starts to dry out okay so because I'm making a ring and it's going to be long and narrow I'm going to fold it over on itself and start forming it while it's in the wrap in more of a snake-like fashion just a longing aiding along gating it and stretching it and then we're going to go ahead and set that down and we're going to set our boarder mold aside and we're going to roll it out - usually most fingers are anywhere from about two and a half to four inches so see how it's sticking to my roller looks like a problem but it's not really that just means it's very very fresh so we're going to start again and this little bit of time where it's doing that it's already starting to dry out so we want to compress it very tightly and make sure there's no air bubbles in it we'll bring back our plastic wrap so I'm taking my time and letting it air dry just a little bit and I'm going to actually set it aside right now and we'll take that time to talk about forming a ring mandrel we'll just set that right there so something you would do in advance is to have a ring mandrel now the clay shrinks about eight to ten percent when you fire it so generally and it's not an exact science but generally your ring will be two sizes smaller than what you make it so if you wear a size 7 ring for instance on your ring finger you're going to want to make a template out of the Teflon paper and you're going to make it on a ring mandrel on a size 9 so I've already gone ahead here and I've prepared a little piece that I took some adhesive tape and it goes right over the center of the nine so I've got to flip this around this is a tapered mandrel so you may have to make a little bit of adjustment to your ring but this is our nonstick surface we're going to form the ring around now let's open this back up put it back on our work surface we don't need to recoat the tool it should have enough of the cool slip on it and we're going to roll it is thin as we can get it and let's see if it comes off cleaning still a little sticky so we're going to let that sit right here for just a second and let it dry out a little bit but let's talk about when it gets to dry sometimes people will show you to use a spritzer with water to rehydrate your clay and I don't recommend that at all because if you spritz it you have no control over how much water you're adding to the clay so we're just going to pretend that our clay needed a little bit of more hydration it's you'll see it start to crack it's going to feel stiff and this literally will start to happen in seconds depending on where you live and how much humidity is in the air this clay is very sensitive to drying and very quickly so I'm just rolling it out and along aiding it this way since it's super moist you can see it's not sticking to my finger because of that wonderful cool slip but when you want to rehydrate your clay you'll flatten it out put it in your plastic and you're going to take a little water with your fingertip and dip it and just a drop and you'll see it spread then you're going to fold your clay over on itself and then just keep opening your plastic and folding it and kneading it and that's going to send that water and it's going to blend it all through the clay and if you need more water you added a drop at a time that way you don't end up with mud okay let's give this another go and I love when things like this happen because it then you can see it's not you it's just happens to everybody so see that was just enough time to make it go beautifully now you can take a ruler and measure it or you can eyeball it but I want to have a piece that's a little bit narrower than the diameter of the cavity I'm using on my border mole so I'm going to cut a a bit of this away and using a nice straight sharp clay blade now let's go ahead and talk about what we do with their scraps because we're going to use all that in fact you might even have enough to make two rings so we're going to move this away but we want to keep this hydrated so when you're storing metal clay that you're not going to use usually for a few days or even sometimes a few weeks if you put it back in your plastic wrap and wrap it very tightly and you have a little plastic zippy bag most people have those everywhere and you take a wet paper towel and put it in there you want to make sure no water gets on the clay but you're making a little hydration chamber okay and we're going to set that aside so it's ready to use later so now we're going to pick this up and we can move all this out of the way and put our piece in the boarder mold and we're going to spread it out then now if you have bigger fingers like I do you might even get in there with let's see handle of a paintbrush and you can just push it down and spread it out to your edges this is wearing in my glasses so this is really delicate at this point so you want to take a tool and it can be tweezers or a needle tool or something and just very carefully lift it up but you're going to ease it out very slowly don't just pull it and then keep pulling you want to lift it up and give it a little help and then you might go back and come from the other side because we don't want to tear this now if you like a thicker ring you can use thicker slats okay so now we've got a nice piece here and we're going to put it right over our Teflon and I'm going to cut with my clay I'm going to cut a little edge you're not going to see it I wanted to cut towards me on my mandrel because if I cut it too close to where you can see it it's going to fall off the mandrel but I'm going to try to flip it around and again we're going to take this before we get too far and if you find your clay is drying out on the mandrel you can actually take a damp paintbrush and keep it moist that way so we're going to put that back in here and we're going to bring the other piece up over the edge and I'm going to flip it around now so hopefully you can see that there and I'm going to cut at a 45 degree angle now this is a little tricky oh that piece just fell out usually just need to lift it up and cut away I'm going to take a craft knife here and bring this little piece back in here you're going to repair this you're going to cut away the excess so that it meets at a beveled angle and this is where you're going to need a little slip syringe so I'm using the green tip you can get it with or without the tips and there's a little too much water in there so if you have that you can take paper towel and just blot that and then we're going to use a craft knife and bring that together and this isn't going to be pretty at first okay so this acts as glue and we need to dehydrate this so I would leave it on the mandrel overnight or if you have a food dehydrator you can put it in there you just want to make sure the mandrel supported so the ring doesn't get crushed and what I try to do is blend it so that the pattern matches you can't always do that you can also go back with your files after it dries and sometimes refine the pattern again and that can be a little tricky what I'm going to do though is add a little bit of extra and we're just going to WIC away a little of that water see how that water that's coming out here okay so will wick a little bit away from the ring and I'm getting a real nice bead on there and we'll take a brush get a damp wick that water away and flatten that that's going to form a scar a metal clay scar and that can be filed away later but to make sure your ring doesn't come apart after you fire it you're going to need to do that both on the outside and let it dry and then once it's dry you're going to slip it off we're going to move all this out of our way you're going to have it on your Teflon paper and you're just going to gently Bend oh there's a break and that's okay well show you how to fix it you're going to gently bend it and hopefully it won't break and slip that out so where there was the break we're going to get that damp and let that sit for a few seconds and soften up that clay and if you need to you can wick away any extra water and we're going to put some syringe right over where that break was now very carefully you don't want to bend do it too much I'm just going to give a slight little tug on that and let that clay slip in there so this would be dehydrated one of my tips for dehydrating is I work with met our polymer clay quite a bit and I'm baking at 230 degrees you can put this in the same oven you bake clay at even up to 250 degrees and dehydrate it and it will dehydrate very very quickly usually in just minutes but I probably give it 10 minutes just to be safe and then when you come back you're always going to look for your seam on the other side when it's dry we're just going to skip that step and you're going to put you're going to dampen it the metal clay get a little bit more water if you need it but you want to control it let's wick that water away and wherever there's a seam or a break in this case you're going to add a bead of your paste now the paste well actually this is the syringe paste the syringe paste is thicker than they cut type you get in the jar so I prefer that for repairs and also for making connections and then we're going to let this dehydrate and then refine it so we're checking for any other seems I've already fixed that the main seam on this one and filed it so while we let that sit dry for a little bit and again you can let it air dry we're going to set that aside and we're going to talk about how we make the bezel setting for our gemstone now something you need to know about fireable gemstones you first have to make sure it is fireable so lab-created stones which are typically a cz and you can get them in all different shapes sizes and colors here at Fire Mountain Gems and beads now this is a stone that's small enough that can be torch fired anything larger than that you'd want to fire in a kiln and you have to know how to ramp your kiln ramping means heating the kiln up slowly and then reaching the peak temperature holding it for at least thirty minutes and letting it cool down slowly so the kiln is programmable and it'll do that you want to do that so you don't experience thermal shock which can crack a fireable stone but let's go ahead and take a look at one of the ways we can create a bezel setting with our clay forest stone so we'll take our leftover clay that we've had set aside and I'm just going to condition it up into a nice ball it feels a little dry you can smooth it out with a little bit of water so I'm making it about a quarter of an inch thick or so and you want a nice smooth surface so again we can take a little bit of a damp brush here and just smooth out the surface very carefully and take a stone of your choosing shape size color I like the look of this tanzanite stone right here and we're going to Center it and press it down gently and keep that table that's the flat top facet of your stone we're going to keep that level and push it down in gently you can even use the flat edge here sometimes that makes it a little bit easier to do that and what the clay is going to do it's going to rise up around the stone like my skin is here when I push down it's going to come up around there and form a natural bezel that locks that stone into place now you can use circle cutters a little piece of a regular drinking straw and cut around it in a circle kind of like I did for this piece here or you can do something maybe a little more artistic so I'm going to take my blade and I am going to cut in a square bezel and it likes to stick to the blade so again if you need to you can go back over your blade with a little bit more of that cool slip on your sponge that won't eliminate it from sticking to your tools completely but it does help and you can refine this later you can clean up those edges we're going to talk about refining with our dehydrator dehydrated ring but when I make these little settings I dehydrate these first and then I'll simply paste them to the ring now one of the tricks I like to use is it's a way I camouflage my seam so if you lost a little bit of your design or it doesn't connect continuously that's how you can cover it up is with a little embellishment so we're putting away our scrap clay and saving it for another project and this would be dehydrated until it's completely dry and then we can attach it with a little of our slip syringe or paste so let's talk about refining our work now the clay is in what we call the green ware state that's the state where it's unfired and in this state is very delicate think of it as having about as much strength as a potato chip chip or a saltine cracker that's not very strong so you might want to have a couple of tools at hand I like to work with a series of different grits of sandpaper and I like to have some files on hand so we start with our sandpaper and you might want to call it cut it in smaller pieces I'm going to start with this size but I'm going to go even smaller with little bit of this now one of the cool tips is that when you're working with grits of sandpaper at least 600 or higher the higher they go the finer they get when you work with the finer grits they'll actually sharpen your scissor blade anything that's heavier than 600 grit which would be a smaller number like 400 those can actually damage your good scissors and you might want to write on the back of your sand papers what grit size they are so you you can tell at a glance you can usually just feel that with your hands but I'm going to cut little strips and you'll see why in a minute so we're going to start with our 600 grit which is the coarsest and sometimes if your ring it feels very smooth you might not even need 600 you could go right away to the next higher grit which is 1200 but I want to make sure the edges of my ring are nice and smooth and level so very gently I'm going to lightly sand them over the paper and I rotate it because you tend to be whether you're left-handed or right-handed you're heavy-handed and you might be sanding at an angle even though you don't think so so rotate it with both hands and then flip it over and smooth it and see how that gives a nice clean edge nice and smooth now I can repeat that and I can go through the various grits here I have 2000 so I'm going to want to jump to my 1200 and you can save this dust and you'd be surprised at how quickly that accumulates and you can turn that into paste you can add it to a paste jar and make your silver clay work much more economical okay and we're going to just go very lightly to the next grit and that creates a nice smooth edge now with my finer grit I may want to lightly go over the top and give it a little bit of smoothness especially if I want a very shiny ring so you can spend as much time as you think you need in the state but remember it's like handling a potato chip now what I'm going to do is use a rubber block to support it and this is helpful so you don't put so much pressure on it now when I refine the inside of the ring sometimes what I like to use is a file and people say which file should I use and my answer is whatever gets the job done so if it's a round surface on the inside you're going to want a file that's got at least one rounded edge like this this one here that's flat on one side and I will see if we can do it this from this angle and I lightly sand or file and I don't concentrate too much in one area at a time I tend to go back and forth and I'm barely putting any pressure on this just take your time and do it gradually and you you can see if you have any gaps because the clay is going to shrink when you fill those cracks you can see if you have any gaps you need to go back and paste again sometimes I have to do this two or three times so don't be surprised if you have to do that as well but you're going to sand it and refine it to your liking and then I take the finer grit of sandpaper what these little strips I can bend them around the curvature of my finger and I can really really refine it moving around and getting this nice and smooth now if you're a little bit nervous if you're new to metal clay and you're a little nervous that you might break it or you find you're prone to breakage you can do all this refining and after the piece has been fired takes a little bit more elbow grease but I use my jewel tool there's all kinds of attachments where you can do all the same smoothing and shining and polishing after your fire when the ring is much stronger and more stable and then we want to take a nice dry brush and just very carefully make sure we brush away any of the the clay dust any dust that's left on your ring is going to fire to the ring and that's going to affect the finish so now we have a nice smooth ring that's ready to fire either in the kiln or with the torch but we're going to torch fire this one and as you can see it's larger than I want it to be but it's going to shrink now if I want to use my stone I would simply find an area in my design usually it's where the seam is or the pattern doesn't match up and paste it to it and voila you've just taken care of that problem and one easy step but we're going to make this one a little bit more simple again a stone over five millimeters needs to be kiln fire five millimeters or smaller can be done with the torch so let's have some fun with fire shall we so the first thing we're going to do is move away all the flammable objects safety is really key when you torch fire now when I teach people are usually very intimidated by the torch but by the time they've done their first piece they're in love with it now everything can't be done with a torch and that everything should be done with a torch but with rings we can do it with a torch or the kiln so we're moving anything flammable out of the way and even though my fire brick is going to get hot on top it's going to stay cool on the bottom or at the very most get warm to the touch so I'm just going to set it on a piece of ceramic tile or you can put it on a cookie tray just to make sure there's no transference of heat but I know it's going to stay nice and cool on the bottom you want to make sure your ring is centered on the brick because we're going to concentrate our heat right there and we're going to want to work within a dim lighting situation it's very bright here in the studio so I'm going to try to simulate that just a little bit you don't want to work in a completely dark room you want to have some light apparent and you're going to want a timer can just be a regular kitchen timer or if you have your smartphone you can download all kinds of great programs or usually your clock feature has a stopwatch that you can use now for rings I recommend three to four minutes we're going to do this one in three minutes and we're going to talk about lighting our torch so igniting our torch takes both hands and several fingers so in the back there is a safety button that has to be pulled down first and then there's a button on the side that you're going to hold in and that gives us our continuous on so you don't have to keep holding that button in the back this is the ignition so with the torch pointed safely away from us and our safety buttons down we're going to press on the side and ignite it now you want to make sure you have the strongest sharpest flame that you can so you may need to do an adjustment this little dial here allows you to adjust the force of your flame so when you hear the most intense hiss that's when you have the strongest flame like that now the blue tip is the hottest part of our flame that's what we're going to concentrate on and when we torch fire the ring and we want to work in a darkened room now you're going to see smoke and where there's smoke there's fire so of course we're working in a well-ventilated room now that fire burns away quickly that is the organic cellulose binder that is what makes the metal particles into clay that's when the shrinkage occurs and what we're looking for is a pink glow now depending on how dark your room is the the darker the room the brighter the glow so I'm going to shade this with my hand see if you can see it's kind of a salmony color so even though it's a little brighter in here if it was more shaded I would see this pink glow and I have to maintain that for three to four minutes of the piece that you're doing you might need to do faster circles to maintain your color or slower circles or you may have to go back and forth but whatever maintains that color that pink glow again that light pink glow that you're seeing on camera in a room that would be darkened that I would do use at home it would be more of a deep salmon and notice I'm continuing to keep the torch at an angle if you hold it straight up and down you're going to feel a lot of heat you could also risk burning yourself but it could also cause the torch to go out so we need just a little bit more than a minute here now this process is known as sintering and that's a scientific term of the molecular fusion of the silver molecules coming together so it has to be done long enough and at the right heat so that those molecules fill together and form this into a solid piece of pure silver failing to torch fire long enough or maintain consistent heat at the right amount can mean that your ring is weak or brittle so this is a very easy thing to learn torch firing is really a lot of fun and I like to do it whenever possible as opposed to using my kiln because I feel like I have a hand in every step of what I'm making I feel like I'm more involved and I just really enjoy this process and I think you'll find if you're new to it you'll come to enjoy it too so we're coming up on two minutes and we're going to talk about cooling our ring if there is a stone in the ring you want to let it cool on its own you can transfer the ring over onto a heatproof surface like a tile on a metal tray and let it cool on its own it'll cool down pretty quickly I'd give it about 15-20 minutes just to be safe or if you don't have a stone you can qala that in just a moment so when we turn off our flame all we have to do is press the back ignition button and you want to make sure you set your torch aside away from anywhere you might come in contact now with our lights fully back on so we can see what we're doing our ring is still hot and I'm going to take it should be a glass or ceramic bowl or dish and we're going to get some tweezers and pick up the ring and we're going to just drop in the bowl did you hear that loach that's culturing again if you have a stone in there you don't want to do that because you run the risk of cracking that stone so you should try this at home but I'm just going to show you the top here is very hot I would never even think of touching the top not for at least an hour but underneath not even warm to the touch so we're going to set this aside to where we can't come in contact with it because you don't want to risk a burn now the second you it hit that water and you heard that little sound it was already cool believe it or not so we'll just dry it off and I want to show you if I had done this in the green ware state it would have just crumbled into a million tiny pieces it's pure metal now if you're new to metal clay and you're wondering why it doesn't look like metal that's because all those silver molecules are standing straight up at attention so back with our rubber work block and we're going to need a wire brush and we're going to do agate burnisher now these brushes if they catch under your fingernails they really hurt so make sure that you're brushing away from your hands now let's just brush a little of this so you can see you can even brush over your stone I'm just a little more careful I try to brush around it can you see that silver color coming up now we have this matte finish and you might just stop there you might like that finish in your ring but if you want it to be shiny you've got a couple of options actually you have quite a few options the first one is to do it by hand either using your agate burnisher or you can bring it to a beautiful high shine using the jewel tool I use various various grades of wheels and don't forget to do the inside of your ring okay but I can finish that later now this agate burnisher if I press on here very hardly and burnished burnished burnished and press as hard as you can you're not going to break this agate furniture you can even get down in the detailed areas with the tip on here but I'm just going to polish a little bit of these areas don't forget your edges I like those to be nice and shiny you see that shine coming up that's because we're flattening down those silver molecules now one of the things I love in my art clay silver work is when you shine something or polish something that's got a raised surface it leaves that matte finish in the back and relief and that's really cool if you're going to leave it just as a pure silver ring okay or you can go ahead and use the liver of sulfur patina gel and you can blacken just the inside recessed areas of all of your metal clay designs and bring the surface back to silver if you want to see how that's done you might want to check out my here's my heart art clay silver project so you can see the shininess on there now if I want my ring to be shiny through and through I would finish it off with my jewel tool or I would throw it in a rock tumbler with some mixed stainless steel shot for about an hour to three hours depending on how shiny you want it that's also going to work hard your ring and make it even stronger so if you do torch fire that's what I recommend doing so let's take a look here a perfect fit how fun is that well thank you for joining me in the Fire Mountain Gems and beads jewelry making studio and have fun with all of your art clay silver projects

Channel: Fire Mountain Gems and Beads

Views: 69,393

Rating: 4.8394532 out of 5

Keywords: art clay silver ring, border mold ring, Art Clay® Silver Border Mold Ring, art clay silver, art clay tutorial, silver clay ring tutorial, silver clay ring, art clay, precious metal clay ring, metal clay ring making, silver clay, metal clay ring, border mold, Lisa Pavelka, metal clay, precious metal clay, silver metal clay jewelry, silver ring, decorative band, jewelry making, fine silver, refine clay, burnish metal, texture mold, jewelrymaking, Jewelry making supplies

Id: RWKZcnMIjFs

Length: 33min 23sec (2003 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 15 2017