How to make: Polymer Clay Arch Earrings in three different styles and shapes

1. Intro: Hello, everyone. My name is Jasmine Kowtow. I am a polymer clay artist in jewelry making and sculpting. And in this class I will teach you how to make three different polymer clay, arch earrings and three different styles and shapes. 2. Materials: the materials you will need for this project are a clay roller, a tool with a point or a ball tip at the end. An Exacto knife bacon bond. It's gonna be used as a glue for the claim. A round circle clay cutter, some flat stud earring backs eight millimeter jump rings in the same color as your earring backs some jewelry pliers, a tissue blade. I will be using the long and short tissue blade, a paint brush with fine bristles. Or, if you don't have a paintbrush, anything else. Any other tool with flying bristles will do some card stock, a pair of scissors, a sheet of aluminum foil. Some additional items you will need are some earring backings, um, a piece of parchment paper or a nonstick. Matt. Um, I will be using a piece of granite tile to work my clay on, but any of those other things will work just fine. 3. Creating Template Shapes : so the first step that we will do is cut out our shapes. I have provided the template for you guys to print and cut out on your own. If you would like to create your own shapes, you can do that as well. Um, I have attached. I have attached it in the class project section and this will be used as a stencil. We're gonna use this as a guideline to cut our shapes out of the clay. 4. Making Polymer Clay Slabs: Now that you have cut out your shapes, we are ready to create the polymer clay slabs. So I am using my roller and rolling out a piece of mixed clay that I had previously conditioned. You want it to be about 1/4 of an inch thick. If you see any air bubbles forming, you can use your Exacto knife to pop them and then continue to roll on. Flatten it out. If you have trouble rolling it out evenly. Use your card stock with both even amounts on each sides and continue rolling. Now I'm going to clean my area and add the secondary color. We are going to roll this out fairly thin, but not too thin that you won't be able to cut into it, right. So I'm just gonna cut random shapes, making a terrorism or effect with just one color. Start taking your triangular bids and put them on the clay. You can spread them out. You can add more colors. You can do a lot of different things. Just have fun and play around with your design. 5. Cutting out your earring shapes: for this next step. We want to get all of our paper templates that we made earlier and just find a spot on your slab where you would like to cut you want. Suppress the paper down on the clay gently and then take your roller in lightly roll over it so that it will not come up while you're trying to cut it and then take your Exacto knife and then trace around the shape. Once your shape husband cut, gently removed the piece of paper by using your Exacto knife and lifting it up by a corner and repeating the process. Take around small clay cutter and cut out to hearing shapes to match the bottom portion of your hearing. Now would be the best time to get out your piece of foil and have it next to you so that once you are finished making a set of earrings, you can just place them on the sheet, take you to shoot blade and gently move in a side to side motion, removing the clay pieces off of your work surface. If you are using a nonstick matt or parchment paper, you can go ahead and skip this step. But if you're using glass or a piece of tile, then you would want to go ahead and use this. Then place your clay shapes onto your foil sheet and continue the process for the rest of the slabs. Take your time. With this step, there may be some times where you see something that is uneven. You might have to correct it. You can use your exact when I have to remove extra bits of clay. 6. Baking the first time: Now that we have all of our cut out shapes on our foil sheet, you want to get your appointed tool or a ballpoint tool and make little holes in the area where we will attach the jump rings. Once the earrings have finished baking, you want the holes to be big enough so that your jump rings can fit through the hole through both holes. Once you have finished this step, place your foil sheet into the oven and bake your earrings according to but baking instructions on your packaging of the clay that you are using. I am using pre most GOP, so for me that would be baking in the oven for 15 minutes at 275 degrees. We will be baking this a second time, so for the first time we put it in the oven, make sure that you're checking on it because every oven is different. Some ovens get hotter than others, and we do not want your earrings to burn. That's happened to me a few times, and I was not really happy about it. 7. Adding components and re-baking: Once your earrings have finished baking, we're going to let them cool completely before moving to this next step. So here have, um, thin, very thin sheet of clay on. We're going to use this to add another layer of clay to the earring backs. So here is where I'm going to take the bacon bond, and I'm gonna put a little bit on top of the hearing, spread that around with my finger, and I'm going to add the flat back hearing backing to the glued portion. So I'm just going to stretch this out a little bit, and then I'm gonna put it right on top, making sure that I'm spreading it evenly. Bacon Bond is gonna help the clay stick to the the raw clay stick to the baked clay. So now if you have any excess, go ahead and take the Exacto knife and cut the excess off. I would like to do it this way because it gives the earrings a cleaner look and it gives it more durability. So now we're going to get our pointed tool and poke the whole make sure that it's the whole is fully cleaned, that there's no extra clay in there, them scrape off any excess. You also want to make sure that the hearing that's the hearing backing that's poking out is aligned with the whole, so that when you put your earrings on that it goes where it's supposed to go. Now we're going to use our paintbrush with fine bristles or any other tool that you can find that has bristles on it. And we're going to pushed down the bristles inside of the clay, giving it a nice texture. - Do the same for the rest of the earrings, and then go ahead and big those for another 15 minutes. We're now going to follow the exact same steps and do the bottom portion of the hearing. - Once you have finished adding your second layer to the bottom portion of your earrings, go ahead and flip them over raw side down. We're going to bake thes again for another 15 minutes. Keep checking your earrings every five minutes or so just to make sure that they have not burned 8. Finishing earrings : the final step is adding the jump rings. I will be using my jewelry pliers to open up the jump, a ring and Adam to my components. You want to do this slowly and gradually to make sure that you will not break the clay or make any nicks in it. Um, I'm using size eight millimeter jump bring because it's big enough to go through both of the holes and have enough space in between each component so that they can move around freely at this time. You can also add your earring backings for the complete finished look. 9. Final thoughts : in this class. We've learned how to make Paul Merkley earrings, using a template making polymer clay slabs, baking and attaching components, thus creating the final product. I encourage each and every one of you to experiment with your own designs and shapes. You never know what you can come up with. I cannot wait to see you guys creations.