Phillipa Fenny is a jewellery designer who attended both our introduction and advanced silver clay workshops and is a member of the Silver Clay Club. She creates some amazing jewellery designs using beads and silver clay under the brand name 'Purple Pickled Onions'. Here Phillipa shares with us a brand new technique she stumbled across purely by accident that produced some wonderful results!
"I had some lovely dicroic glass cabochons that I wanted to set into pendants and I wanted to try to make something different from my usual pieces of work. I had some new shape templates to try out so I decided that would be my starting point and would take it from there.
After cutting out my pendant shapes and setting the dichroic glass cabochons where I wanted them, I made the bails for each one out of a rope of clay coiled around a straw andpendant itself. I was pleased with what I had so far , but they were still lacking something....a texture.
I have loads of texture mats etc in my tool box but I'd got tired of using the same ones over and over again and it was whilst I was sanding them that a thought struck me......the cling film I'd used to keep my clay moist had dried bits of clay all over it that fell off in little flakes when I picked it up. I wondered if they could be used for adding texture to my sanded pieces. I then wondered about mixing these flakes with the sanding dust left on my board from sanding the pendants.
I wasn't sure how it would turn out but I gave it a go and mixed some of the flakes with sanding dust and sprinkled them on the part of the pendant I wanted them to stick to. They looked great once dried, but would it still look as good once fired or would they melt and go into a mass blob in the kiln ?...well here are the results see for yourself. I must admit I was pretty pleased with how they have turned out."
