Scheduled creativity

I haven't spent much time on my jewellery recently. Well, to be honest, I didn't spend any time at all on beading. The other day, when I was actually looking for a beginner sewing course, I came across the Make Lounge. Based in Islington (just 15 minutes from my office - very handy), the Make Lounge offers a wide range of creative workshops, from sewing over cooking to jewellery making. In addition to running a shop which sells all sorts of craft supplies.

So, instead of the sewing class, I signed up for the 3 hour evening class 'Silver Charm Bracelet or Pendant'. One of the difficulties with making your own silver jewellery (I attended a weekend workshop about two years ago, where I made my own silver ring) is that you need a proper workspace as well as learning the various techniques on how to form the silver. This course used metal clay instead of silver. It's like actual clay with silver particles embedded in it. Once you've made your charm/pendant and fire the jewellery, you are left with silver. And you can relatively easily do this in your own home.

There were 7 other workshop attendees. We each got about 5g of metal clay - which is not a lot. You roll out the clay (like dough) on a smooth surface (we used a tile) and then cut out the charm. We used a variety of  cutters (stars, hearts, flowers) that you normally use for cake decorating. Don't forget to put a (big enough) hole in it, so that you can actually put the charm onto a bracelet! You then blow dry the charms with an ordinary hairdryer. Once they are dry, they will lift off the tile. You then use a babywipe (or dampened kitchen towel), to smooth over any rough edges. Once that's done, the clay gets fired. You can either use a bunsenburner, or a gas hob or camping stove. We used a camping stove. Put a firing gauze on the stove, lie the charm on top and fire it for a couple of minutes. Using a metal polishing brush and silver sanding paper, you polish the charms - and voila the silver appears.

Overall, I enjoyed the workshop and am quite keen on getting the equipment to try this at home. Staff was really friendly, but there were a few things, I wasn't too happy with:

• the price: the workshop cost £69, which I think is very expensive for what it was. It included all the tools and the metal clay. But we only got 5g each, which is not a lot. Yes, it's relatively expensive, but 5g cost about £12.
• there were only two hairdriers for the whole group. I was lucky to get there first, but I wouldn't have wanted to wait around for so long to be able to use one of them.
• the teacher broke one of my charms. Admittedly, I didn't make the holes big enough in the charms. When she was trying to enlarge them, she broke off a piece. Given that I paid for that piece of metal clay, I would have expected to be given another piece - but no such luck.

I guess at the end of the day, I was primarily frustrated that I couldn't fit a jumpring through any of my charms and that 2 out of 5 broke in the process of trying...

This is what survived