Mixing sterling silver & silver clay

Have a couple of ideas to use sterling silver and silver clay
together, primarly using silver clay from a syringe, directly onto
sterling silver.

Am interested to know how I go about fusing or soldering them
together? Is there a trick or special technique? Huge thanks, in
anticipation :slight_smile:

Have a couple of ideas to use sterling silver and silver clay
together, primarly using silver clay from a syringe, directly onto
sterling silver. 

It would be better to use fine silver instead. Or just use metal
clay. You can get more answers at the yahoo group metal clay
gallery, where there are more metal clay folks than there are here.

Elaine
http://www.CreativeTextureTools.com

Silver clay shrinks between 8 and 12% depending on the brand. Art
Clay has a specialty brand, Overlay Paste, which is created to bond
to nonporous surfaces. I’ve used it as an intermediary between
sterling and the silver clay. You have to fire them together in a
kiln if you’ve created an area larger than the size of a silver
dollar. Of course, if you do that, you anneal the silver.

Jackie

I use fine silver in my construction, fusing with a butane torch for
small items, or a propane bottle for larger ones. I do use PMC slip,
but as a gap filler only between the fine silver pieces I am fusing
together.

Now that copper clay has come out, why not knead 7.75 grams of it
into 92.5 grams of PMC? That might combine better with your sterling
items.

Andrew Jonathan Fine

You can mix silver and copper metal clays to make your own alloys.
You can read about the technique at

As for getting silver clay syringe to stick to milled sterling
sheet, the shrinkage will be a problem for you. The silver clay
syringe work will shrink when fired. In order to fire on sterling, it
will have to be buried in activated carbon to keep the sterling from
oxidizing/fire scale. Alternately, you can raise a fine silver
surface by depletion gilding the sterling, but you still have the
shrinkage problem. The shrinkage will still most likely detach it
from the base piece at least in places and you will have a hard time
re-attaching it. Much easier to make the whole thing from clay.

Another good solution is to make the syringe work, fire it, then
solder it onto the sterling base.The syringe work will need to be
very well constructed, continuous without breaks.

Mary Ellin D’Agostino, PhD
medacreations.com

Dr. D’Agostino,

In your opinion, would caning techniques, borrowed from glass or
polymer bead making, work using the silver and copper as different
colors?

Andrew Jonathan Fine

In your opinion, would caning techniques, borrowed from glass or
polymer bead making, work using the silver and copper as different
colors? 

You can use pure silver clay and one or more copper-silver alloys
(varying mixtures of copper and silver clays) to produce this
effect. The pure silver and pure copper clays will not bond well and
the copper will be weak if fired at the temperatures needed to fire
the silver; plus the alloys need an even lower temperature. However,
you can’t do as much manipulation of the base piece as you would with
polymer clay because the metal clays mix and meld into each other
more readily than polymer clays. You would have to experiment a bit
with your techniques to come up with the effect you want.

You can also start with metallic copper (or fired copper clay) and
combine it with silver clay, but the shrinkage issue means there
will probably be warping, repair, and multiple firings.

Cheers,
Mary Ellin
medacreations.com