Come join us for our first Bronzclay class on December 13th from 10am – 4pm at The Stamp Act. We’ll be serving warm cider and cookies during the class. Come learn about this fascinating new product, similar to Precious Metal Clay. When fired your pieces will have a beautiful rainbow patina. You can then finish to a warn bronze color or leave the patina.

Cost: $120

Class fee includes 100 gram packet of Bronzclay, use of textures, tools, kiln, and finishing supplies. Students can expect to make 30-40 pieces of jewelry, just in time for the holidays! We will also have antique brass chains, jump rings, clasps, and sterling silver ear wires for sale during the class.

The bronzclay takes much longer to fire than PMC. Therefore, we will be firing the pieces after class. You can either pick up your fired pieces a week later at The Stamp Act or you can make arrangements to meet me at my home studio or in Brookline in the evening. I want to make this easy for everyone.

Please call The Stamp Act at (781) 837-5890 to register. 50% deposit required upon registering for class.

Open Studio Annoucement

This is for all my students: starting this weekend you can reserve 3 hours of open studio time at The Stamp Act for $20. Each additional 3 hours is $5 (so for 6 hours the cost is $25). You will have to provide your own clay, but you will be able to use my textures, PMC tools, dehydrator, finishing supplies, liver of sulfur, tumbler, dapping block, etc at The Stamp Act. The Open Studio time does not include any instruction. (The owner of the store, Marie, has a lot of experience with PMC and Bronzclay, but she may be teaching a class while you are there for the open studio). You will need to call ahead to reserve your space. The kiln is not on site. Leave your pieces to be fired at the store, and I will fire and polish them for $1/piece. If you want to apply keum-boo to your pieces, please let me know so I don’t polish them. You can then either pick them up at my home studio, the store, in the evening in Brookline, or I can mail them Priority Mail to you.

Call Marie at The Stamp Act at (781) 837-5890 to reserve your Open Studio time. Once you have taken one of my Bronzclay classes you will also be able to work on your Bronzclay projects during Open Studio time.

The Stamp Act is open Tuesday – Saturday 10am – 6pm and Sunday 12pm – 5pm. We are occasionally there later on Saturday nights, but please call ahead.

The Stamp Act is located at 58 Main Street, Marshfield, MA. It’s just minutes off Route 3.

Directions:

Take route 3 south (towards the Cape)

Exit 12, stay in the right lane and bear right onto route 139. You’ll pass the Christmas Tree store on your right. About a mile on your left is a Starbucks drive-thru. (I cannot help myself with all the landmarks) At the third set of lights, turn left onto Route 3A. The Stamp Act will be the fourth driveway on your right. You’ve passed the store if you can see the Marshfield Fairgrounds.

My studio is usually a mess right up until 15 minutes before a class.  I recently bought my jewelers bench from Warg Etc.  I love it.  I feel inspired to create new jewelry every night when I get home from work.  It’s amazing how much the bench has organized the studio.  Here’s a peek into the studio with my new bench.

Last week I was reading Tamra Gentry’s blog.  She mentioned in her blog that she is selling some of her hammers.  I have a collection of hammers.  I have them displayed on my wall in the studio like art.  I love looking at them.  I have almost all of the Fretz mini hammers.    I bought Tamra’s Peddinghaus Embossing hammer.

Make sure to check out Tamra’s jewelry on her website to see all the amazing stones she uses in her jewelry.

This is a picture of all my hammers.  Most are displayed on the wall and a couple more a waiting for some more wall space including my mallets.

I received Charles Lewton-Brain’s book, Foldforming, today from Amazon. I am in love with this book. I am have been wanting to learn how to add veins to leaves by using fold forming techniques, but Charles Lewton-Brain has taken fold forming to the nth degree. His step-by-step instructions in the book are so easy to follow. He will be teaching this summer at Metalwerx in Waltham, MA. I wish I had the time/ money to go. It’s a week long class starting August 6th. Charles Lewton-Brain has published many articles ranging from Fold Forming, to Patinas for Small Studios, to Small Tools for Jewelers. These are wonderful articles to add to your library. You can get many of these articles one on CD. He has also written many articles on Ganoskin. Here’s my fist attempt at fold forming. Nothing is filed yet or sanded. I had a blast hammering away at the metal. I think this was the most I’ve ever used my torch. I cannot wait to get into the studio to make more pieces.

We had a wonderful class weekend before last (June 28th and 29th) at Warg Etc in Scarborough, ME. This was the first 2-day metal clay class with Pauline Warg. On Saturday I taught Metal Clay Basics and on Sunday, I was a student in Pauline’s class, Metal Clay Enameling. It was a great class. I had a hard time at first getting the colors to work with me….but that’s because I was reading the chart backwards…..I was looking at how the colors appeared on copper not silver. In the end I loved my butterfly and koi fish. I did not experiment with any of the opaque colors since I had a lot of texture I wanted to see through the colors. I really enjoyed working with the translucent colors. It took a while, but the best results were when I layered the colors.

Here are some pictures from the class:

We had a great weekend in Cambridge at NOCA this weekend.

In addition to the obvious goal of doing a show (selling some jewelry), we really enjoyed (the so much more important goals) of seeing good friends, and talking about our classes with nice people.

Here area some photos of the setup for people who were not able to attend the show.