Part 1 - Silver Clay
You Will Need: Silver Clay (20g), A Cutting Mat, Scissors, an acrylic sheet, an optional template or cutters and a craft knife, playing cards
Before getting started with your silver clay, make sure you have cleared your cutting mat of any plant bits and you have cleaned and dried your acrylic sheet as you don’t want anything to contaminate your clay. It’s also worth remembering before you begin that Silver Clay will dry out quite quickly so remove the amount you want to work with and put anything you’re not using back into it’s original packaging making sure it’s fully wrapped and sealed.
If the original packaging has become damaged, cling film/saran wrap works well as an alternative.
20g of clay will make 6 small medallions of between 3 and 4 grams each, so you can either weigh out (with scales) what you need or cut a proportion of the packet that you have with a craft knife (ie: one sixth of a 20g packet).
Roll your silver clay into a ball in your palms and place it in the centre of your cutting mat.
Place your mould on your cutting mat and place the ball of clay in the centre of your design. Press the clay into the mould with your clean sheet of acrylic, pushing the clay into your design. Be careful to press down as evenly as possible to ensure an even and flat disc forms around your design. When you are happy, remove the mould from the clay by inverting the acrylic sheet so that the mould is on the top and gently peel away the mould to reveal your imprinted clay.
If at any point you are not happy with your impression, you can always roll your clay back into a ball and start again.
If you’re happy with the shape of the clay you can leave it as it is, but if you’d like to cut it into a true round or oval shape use cutters or a template and craft knife to cut around the inside edge of the shape you have chosen. Remove any errant scraps of clay from the craft knife as you go, and then once you have gone all the way around remove the template and any excess clay.
All the offcuts can be rolled into a ball and put back into the packaging for use later.
To remove your clay from the acrylic sheet very carefully slide a playing card underneath it being really careful not to warp or deform the clay.
Pop it to one side and repeat the process with all six of your moulds.