Make your own teacher gifts

The end of the school year is nearing and you and your child may enjoy ideas for making your own presents to show thanks to the teachers in your life. Teacher presents need not be expensive to be thoughtful. Look around your house and there are many items you can upcycle into great gifts. Here are a few ideas:

How to Make a Pencil Holder from Floppy Disks
How to Make Cuff Links from Games
How to Make a Clock from a Bicycle Chain Ring 
How to Make Perfumed Bath Salts
How to Make a Pendant from a Hotel Key
How to Make a Hair Stick from a Record Album
How to Make Wine Markers

Enamel Jewelry

We love, love, love enamel jewelry. We love to make copper, sterling and gold enamel jewelry and we like to make enamel on glass jewelry.

This blog post highlights tutorials explaining how to create your own enamel on metal jewelry:

How to Make Cloisonne Enamel

How to Make a Champleve Enamel Pendant

How to Torch Fire Enamel

Jewelry Cleaning Tips

If you make jewelry, sooner or later someone is going to ask you the question: What is your favorite methods for jewelry cleaning? There are a lot of chemicals that can be used for jewelry cleaning, but we like to keep our jewelry clean being mindful of the environment. Following are tutorials explaining how to keep you hand made jewelry clean without using harsh, environmentally taxing chemicals:

How to Clean Jewelry with Baking Soda

How to Clean Tarnished Silver with Baking Soda and Tin Foil

How to Clean Gold Filled Jewelry 

How to Remove Tarnish from Copper Jewelry

The best way to keep sterling silver or copper clean is to keep it from tarnishing in the first place. This tutorials recommends how to prevent tarnish on your sterling and copper jewelry:

 How to Prevent Jewelry from Tarnishing

Soldering Tips for Jewelry Makers

One of my professors, I can not remember who, told us that learning to solder is really to gain the keys to the jewelry making kingdom. You can create beautiful jewelry without ever soldering, but if you learn how to solder you will really improve the range of projects you can create.

Before you begin soldering you will need to purchase the correct equipment and then prepare your metal. These tutorials will explain How to Prepare Metal for Jewelry Soldering and How to Make Pickle  to remove firescale caused by soldering.

You can use a number of different torches or gases to solder. When you speak with metalsmiths they are often passionate about their own choice. I have used many, many different torches and gases when taking courses and teaching at a variety of schools and workshops. For beginners, a butane soldering torch is a good low cost item. You may decide you love soldering and want to go on and purchase more expensive, "professional" equipment later; but until you decide this is for you and you love soldering, a butane torch is a piece of starter equipment. This tutorial will explain How to Solder Using a Small Butane Torch.

If you run into problems when soldering, then it is a good idea to begin by checking the basics. This tutorial explains How to Correct Soldering Problems when Jewelry Making.

Most butane torches are self igniting. If you purchase a torch that is not self igniting, you will need to know  How to Light a Torch.

Metal Clay Tips & Tutorials

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We get asked a lot of questions about metal clay. The most common question we hear is "what brand of metal clay is better?" For our money, both PMC and Art Clay are terrific products. Deciding which product you prefer is a lot like deciding whether to purchase Coke or Pepsi. We use both.

Most projects in metal clay begin by rolling out the clay. Below is a tutorial that explains an easy technique to roll your clay out even every time:
How to Make a Metal Clay Rolling Frame

Some folks like to alter the texture of the metal clay to make it easier to use. Here are two techniques to do so:
How to Make Lavender Oil Paste for Metal Clay
How to Make Flexible Metal Clay

Sometimes metal clay dries out. It can be reconstituted and used again as paste. Here is how:
How to Reconstitute Dried Out Metal Clay

There are a number of ways to set stones in metal clay. Here are some stone setting tutorials:
How to Prong Set Gemstones and Glass in Metal Clay
How to Make a Metal Clay Bezel Setting (Using the Coil Method)
How to Set Glass in Metal Clay (Using the Captured Stone Method)

Here we have some stone setting slide shows:
Making Tabs In Metal Clay to Set Stones and Glass
Make Your Own Metal Clay and Fused Glass Bezel Set Pendant
Make Your Own Bezel Setting (with Metal Clay and Fine Silver)
Make Your Own Coil Set Metal Clay Pendant
Make Your Own Prong Set Metal Clay Pendant

Metal clay is great for making custom clasps. There are numerous types of clasps and a lot of ways to make clasps. Here are some tutorials containing metal clay clasp making techniques:
How to Make a Metal Clay Toggle Clasp
How to Make a Metal Clay Hook and Eye Clasp
How to Make a Fancy "S" Clasp out of Metal Clay


Folks like to add color to metal clay. You can use resin, enamel and colored pencils to add color (and we will cover those techniques in a future blog entry). Here is an easy technique to add color to your metal clay designs using ceramic decals:
How to Use Ceramic Decals on Metal Clay

Finally, metal clay is all about texture, sculpting and molding. Texture can be found everywhere and molds are easy to make. These tutorials explain how to collect texture for use in metal clay as well as how to create metal clay duplicates:
How to Create Polymer Clay Molds
How to Use Polymer Clay Molds
Just be sure to use olive oil rather than corn starch when using polymer clay molds with metal clay.

Enjoy playing with metal clay!

The originl found art: The Art of Gaman at the Renwick

The use of found objects in art is a modern notion. In other times, art was made with items available. Scarcity required that everything be used. In no other exhibit is art by necessity more evident than in The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942–1946, an exhibit currently on display at the Renwick Gallery.

Delphine Hirasuna, guest curator of the exhibition and author of the accompanying catalogue, said that the idea for the exhibit began because of a bird pin. After the death of her mother, Hirasuna found a stunning hand made bird pin while she was cleaning out her mom's attic. She realized it was a piece of art jewelry created when her mother was interned in camps at the direction of the FDR following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.


Japanese Americans taken to the camps were only allowed to bring what they could carry. The camps provided only Army cots in the living quarters. Folks interned in the camps began to create objects out of  necessity. The made chairs, tables, places to hang their clothes.

As time in the camps progressed, artists began to train camp dwellers in various crafts to help stave off boredom and to add beauty to life events-- both special and ordinary.. Corsages were made out of shells to celebrate weddings. Vases were made from leftover pipes to hold plants. Canes were carved from wood to help folks walk in the mud.

Discovery of the bird pin led Hirasuna to investigate other crafts made in the camps. The result is a spectacular exhibit. Hirasuna managed to select fabulous examples of found art and explain the significance of each piece in a way that highlighted the plight of its maker. My college age son, a government major, declared  The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942–1946 "the best exhibit I have seen in a long time." I concur.

The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942–1946 is on exhibit at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC now through January 30, 2011.

Photo credits
Himeko Fukuhara, Kazuko Matsumoto (Interned at Amache, Colorado, and Gila River, Arizona). Bird pins. Scrap wood, paint, metal. Collection of the National Japanese American Historical Society. From The Art of Gaman by Delphine Hirasuna, ©2005, Ten Speed Press. Terry Heffernan photo.

Upcycle to Create Plastic Jewelry

There are so many ways to turn plastic destined for the garbage and recycling pail into plastic jewelry. We already wrote about how to make plastic jewelry from plastic bottle caps.

Below are tutorials on how to take advantage of  thermosoftening plastic and other properties peculiar to plastic to turn everyday objects into spectacular fashion jewelry:

How to Make a Knitting Needle Bracelet
How to Make a Soda Bottle Bracelet
How to Make a Pendant from a Hotel Key
How to Make a Mosaic Photo Frame
How to Make Earrings from a Credit Card
How to Make a Bracelet from a Credit Card
How to Make Charms from Plastic Bottles