Super tiny, Super rough, but I'm Super Excited!

For my birthday, hubby-dear bought me a Silver Metal Clay kit. It's something we've both been checking out for a while at the hand-craft department store (yes, a whole department store devoted to hand-crafts - can you tell why I'm having trouble leaving this country?). It looked too good to be true. A clay substance that once fired ends up being 0.99% silver.

To start me off, he bought me the PMC3 Silver Pot Starter Kit, which contained (a tiny bit) of the silver clay, a number of tools, the cutest little pot kiln and solid fuel. The instructions of course were all in Japanese so he ordered a book in English on-line as well.

Late last night I started playing with the clay, I fired it this afternoon and wore it out tonight. Being impatient as I was to begin playing, I didn't read all of the instructions, so I made a few mistakes along the way. This resulted in the piece being a bit rougher than I would have liked, but we'll just call it wabi-sabi shall we? Only 7 grams of clay was included in the kit, so that meant that the final piece is tiny.

Other than my little mistakes (mostly involving me trying to move bits and join bits while they were still to soft), this was so easy to use. Many years ago, I used to sculpt in clay, so it was really fun playing with this medium, knowing that in the end it was going to result in a silver piece of jewellery.

So, here's the result of my first attempt! The insert is a tiny piece of kimono fabric. It is actually much shinier than it appears in this photo.

I was too excited this time to take step-by-step photos but promise I'll try next time.. which hopefully won't be too far away. Now the biggest decision is after school tomorrow, do I go to the big city to buy more clay, do I get my butt back behind the sewing machine or do I go to the gym..... mmm.. I really do wish there was 3 of me!