One Month Later

So a month ago, today, my family buried our Mother.

It was actually a really lovely day and beautiful service. I will post about that at some point.

However, this is a post about some jewellery I made.

A while before she died Mum and I talked about making memento jewellery from fine silver using precious metal clay. It was so she could always be with us.

These are sculpey moulds of Mum's thumbprints. The piece on the far right is a thumb imprint made from the moulds. This was used to imprint the silver clay.

Silver clay rolled out ready to take the imprint.

Cutting out the clay around the thumbprints.

The pieces were dried and then filed/sanded to give them smooth edges before firing.

Fired in my kiln according to manufacturers instructions!

After firing the pieces have a fine white layer over them, this is the organic binder burning out of the clay.

Using a brass brush clean all the residue off :)












Mmmm liver of sulphur, guess what, it smells bad!
This is to put a patina on the silver and bring out the
thumbprints.

A lovely dark patina :)

After the patina is buffed off it settles in the cracks and voila, lovely shiny maternal thumbprints.

I made one for each of us. The one on the left uses an imprint mould and has my thumbprint in the back. That one is for me and now hangs on my necklace next to a pendant my sister bought me.







This is hardly my most detailed tutorial but happy to answer more specific questions in the comments.

Lots of hugs to you Purky Blurkers

xxx