Today I treated myself to a day out. I drove across the fens to a beautiful cambridgeshire village, and went to a silver clay workshop run by the wonderful Emma Mitchell also known as silverpebble.
I took lots of pictures.
This is my workplace, complete with tile, craft knife, rolly thing (I’m just all over this technical language) and of course the all important silver art clay.
We learnt to use two techniques. First this is creating a silicone mould from a shell I brought from home.
And this is fennel from Emma’s garden, pressed directly into clay.
And while we learnt, we chatted, laughed, drank coffee, and eventually took a break for these rather gorgeous items.
Our little pieces of clay were drying in the oven while we took our well earned break. What? It’s hard work having fun 😉
I was particularly amused to discover that one of my fellow attendees is actually from a neighbouring village to me in county Durham. That’s not a thing that happens very often, meeting somone who’s heard of it to be honest!
After the drying, there was a bit of cleaning up of edges. Which I don’t seem to have any pictures of, probably due to the whole wet cloth in the hand thing, making holding a camera kind of difficult. Next, though, the magic bit.
(I think this isn’t the picture I thought it was. I’ll try to deal with that tomorrow.) Basically, this is the magical moment when the impurities burn off the piece of clay and the bonding takes place, turning the piece into silver waiting to be found. The hot pieces are dropped into a cup of water, where they make the most extraordinary noise, and there’s a visible puff as they cool.
Now all that remains is the refining, polishing, and of course rings, chains and so on. So from this
comes this
Isn’t that just utterly gorgeous? I’m thrilled to pieces with it, and I’m not usually a jewellery person to be honest. I also have a pair of snowflake button earrings, the fennel pendant (which I’d expected to be my favourite, but I just love the delicacy of the seed head in the other one. Incidentally, Emma ran out to find me the seed head when I showed her the instagram of the last grass standing. Now that’s a personalised crafting experience.) and my little shell as cast above.
I cannot recommend the whole experience enough. It was just so much fun, and to come away with beautiful finished silver pieces in 4 hours of time was very satisfying.
Although, actually, I didn’t come away immediately. Instead we got chatting, about a whole range of things, and ended up having lunch together. Which was even more wonderful.
And all through following someone on social media. It’s not the real world though, is it 😉
You can find Emma on twitter as silverpebble and instagram where she’s silverpebble2 and she also has a really rather lovely blog.
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