Things you need to get started!

Do you hoard unnecessary yet expensive tools for a craft that you are completely unaware of?Do you find a tool attractive and indulge in impulse buying?Do you feel the guilt of spending more than one can reap from it? Then this post should help save a couple of bucks on investing on the required materials you need to start for terracotta jewelry making. Buying materials for a craft without knowing it might cost you more! You probably are going to ask – “who does that?”. Well, more people than you can expect go shopping for tools without knowing its purpose. Invest first on learning, then on materials. To put it in simple words, terracotta jewelry making is the art of handcrafting pieces with low fire earthen ware clay, dried, fired and glazed or painted before assembling the piece together. Before you start reading this list given below, please look for a pottery studio that can fire the jewelry for you unless you own a kiln. If you are a beginner I would NEVER recommend crude firing methods at home. Its unsafe, unproven and rarely gives you the desired result. All the effort that goes into making the raw piece into beautiful jewelry is wasted if not fired well. Please don’t overlook this step.

• First on the list is “clay” - Low fire earthen ware clay.  Never compromise and buy something off the shelves without knowing or trusting the source. Preferably buy local, from a pottery studio. Feel the clay and know that for jewelry making, fineness is an important factor.

• Second is your working surface. A stretched canvas sheet or an unpolished wooden surface works best. The friction that both these surfaces provides is a must for working with clay. This can be easily found or made at your local carpenter shop.

• Rolling pin: Found in most Indian homes 😊

• Then comes the thickness scales. These are a pair of wooden scales of thickness 0.5 or 0.6 cms for pendants and 0.25 to 0.3 cms for earrings. These scales help you get equal thickness slabs. The ones who don’t have a slab roller (which happens to be a rather expensive piece of equipment) these scales come handy and work perfectly well for our use.

• Rib: Available in several materials such as rubber, aluminum, wood and plastic. They help with giving smooth finish for both wheel throwing and hand building forms.

• Cookie cutters: Small, medium and large. The shapes you desire. But do stick to some of the basics such as circles and squares. The sizes are mentioned so as to help with making studs (small) to hook earrings or small pendants (medium) to pendants (large).

• Jhumka mold or a quilling mold: This plastic tool with several hollow dome shapes of different sizes is a must-have. Not only are they handy for making jhumkas, they also help in getting size references for making beads.

• Pliers: Cutting, round nose and chain nose pliers. Off late we have started getting the bent- nose pliers which are useful too. These usually come as a set. They are a must have for all jewelry makers.

• Nichrome wire: A wire that comprises of nickel and chromium sustains the high temperatures of an electric kiln. Its useful for adding hooks to unfired clay pieces. Gauge 24 for pendants, 26 for earrings and 28 for stick beads and ghungroo beads. (these bead names may not ring a bell if you are a beginner, but will come across soon).

• A small knife: It helps with cutting, carving and smooth out a slab. If not for a fettling knife, a kitchen knife without any ridges works perfectly fine.

• X-acto: A sharp pointed knife with a short blade that helps with getting clean crisp cuts. Available in most stationary stores and online.

• A ribbon tool, that has a different purpose for wheel potters, but for jewelry making its great tool for scooping out excess clay from a jhumka. In the image shared below the ribbon tool is the one which has loop like structure at both the ends one being conical and the other end being circular.

• A finishing tool: A silicon tip finishing tool is useful to provide final touches to a piece where you can’t smooth using your hands. These tools have a fine tip and softens the places they are used at. They usually come as a set of 4 tools that look like paint brushes with a soft flexible tip but that number might vary. Its used for other forms of jewelry created with polymer and air dry clay.

• A ball point pen. Please retain all the parts. Trust me, these are really useful. From the refill to the outer part to the nib and caps, everything comes handy.

• Thick sheets of paper or kraft board if you want to make personalized shapes and use them as cutters.

This is it. Surprised!! Well this is what one would ideally need to get started on terracotta jewelry making. Keep an eye out for interesting shapes, things around your house, perfume bottle caps etc. All these come at zero cost and most end up giving you brilliant and sometimes unexpected results. As you learn more, you will add on tools and materials based on your need, but as a beginner the above mentioned materials should give you a good start.

Assembling:

The assembling part for any jewelry has a ton of options. You can work with a different selection of cords, beads and stoppers. Earrings have options such as stud posts, hooks, balis etc. A few eye pins and head pins would be good to have. “Araldite” in India is an industrial adhesive that helps glue posts to studs. I find the product reliable and cost effective for the job it does. The paints I rely on are fevicryl hobby ideas acrylic paints. They coat well giving a neat finish. Good quality round tip nylon paint brushes of size 00, 2,4,6 and 8 would give one a good range to work with. An optional step would be varnish. I personally don't varnish my pieces but a lot of them who have concerns with their paint peeling off, a coat of varnish will help. I hope this information helps you with deciding on the must-haves as a terracotta jewelry maker without excessively spending on tools and materials just because they have an attractive packaging.

Thank you!

Neha Gopinath Pillai