Explore Practitioners 2: Clay Jewelry Making – Yukie Miyazaki

My friend has an online business making earrings with oven-bake polymer clay. She explores the medium through different colours that can in turn create different patterns, and through different shapes as well, allowing her to create a myriad of designs. 

Process documentation

My friend usually begins with an idea of what the end product of the earring will look like. With that idea in mind, she selects the colours of the clay that she will be using and sets them aside. She has a piece of baking sheet set up on her table for her to roll and flatten the clay on so that the clay will not stick to the surface of her table. She then rolls the clay into her desired design before poking holes into the pieces of clay (to attach the earring hooks) and baking them. 

The marble designs are made by mixing the clay of different colours together and rolling them into a ball before flattening it. 

Tools Used

The tools that she uses varies from formal tools meant for jewelry making to make-shift ones. 

Tweezers and Pliers to manipulate the jump hooks in order to attach the earring pieces together, and a penknife as well as a painting knife that is used to help flatten the clay pieces and cut out bits that help to shape it. 
She uses this colour pencil box as a pin roller in to flatten her clay pieces. 
Jump hooks and earring hooks.
Oven-bake polymer clay! She also mixes colours in order to get the colour that she wants should they not be available. 

She also makes use of toothpicks and satay sticks in order to poke the holes in the clay, and the oven in her home to bake the clay.

Workspace 

Her workspace exists on her marble dining table. The surface of the marble aids her creative process as well as it is cool and smooth and is suitable to place the clay on without it sticking. However, it is quite messy as she stuffs all her tools and materials into two plastic boxes, which can make it a bit difficult to find the specific tools that she needs at times. 

Pain points

Another particular issue that she faced was that she found it tough to work with pure white clay as dust got caught on it easily and was very visible (which is why she often had to mix it with other colours). 

Sometimes, due to air bubbles, the clay would also crack after being baked. 

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