Falling Leaf Bead
Page 2
7. Use your knife to cut the extra clay around the leaf image.
8. Continue to cut around the leave until you have the complete image of your leaf.
9. Pick up the clay leaf, and wrap it around your straw.
10. To ensure that one side of the leaf bead isn’t flat, you’ll want to set the straw either up right in a bowl of vermiculite so that the clay is able to dry, or you can position the straw over a small jar. There are a lot of ways to dry the clay. You just want to make sure that the clay isn’t sitting flat on a surface.
11. Once the clay is dry (time will depend on the humidity around you), fire it in a kiln. For fine silver clay, this would mean to fire it at 1650 degrees F or 900 degrees C for two hours. During the firing process, though the clay is not toxic, be careful of the fumes from the plastic straw that will burn out. These are toxic! Do not breath in these toxic fumes!
12. Once the bead is fired, it will look white, as if it has been pickled.
13. You may need to file a little on your piece. I didn’t have to, but I’ve seen some silver clay pieces that require a little file touch up. Supposedly you can use an emery board or fine sand paper. If you have jeweler’s files, you could use these as well.
14. The final step is to polish your bead. I used my magnetic polisher. You could also use your flexible shaft with some attachments or a polishing wheel. You’ll see that it will come out a beautiful, bright silver!
For making this leaf bead, I followed the instructions in Tim McCreight’s
Working with Precious Metal Clay, and I did not vary from them. I’m pretty happy with the way the bead turned out. I might try this again and make it a little thicker though by using 3 cards on each side when rolling out the clay. If you decide to try this project, please be extra careful about the fumes from the kiln. You could also use food items like bread instead of the plastic. Organic items will burn out in the kiln, and they won’t make you sick.
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All graphics created by Tammy Powley.
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