From creating the perfect design to adding a touch of intricacy, making terracotta jewelry involves several steps. It is essential to follow these steps correctly to ensure that terracotta jewelry has the neatness and style to mesmerize you.
Our expert artisans put in a lot of effort to make fine premium terracotta jewelry. Here’s a brief on the processes followed in Arterra Studio. It’s a matter of great pride that over the years many in house techniques and tools have been developed which add immense beauty and grace to the finished piece.
Pre-work is the Foundation
Before our artisans work with clay to create terracotta jewelry, we have a long process of ideating and designing. Here, our designers focus on different trends while coming up with designs.
Sometimes, a design might not work as expected on the clay. Here, our designers perform multiple iterations. The various steps of the pre-work process are:
- First and foremost, support material is made ready well in advance. For example, heat-resistant wires are cut in desired shapes and sizes. These help in holding the clay for complex designs.
- Smaller beads supported by wires or otherwise are made with clay and dried. These are a very important part of overall embellishments for the jewelry design. Different shaped and textured beads are made with bare hands and minimal sculpting tools . Some beads may involve intricate carving too. Its worth recalling that this task is completed much before the work on main design starts. The reason being that beads need to be bone dry beore they can be used on the main design.
- Now is the time to work on a rough prototype to check and correct measurements for the design. It’s important to factor in that the size of the jewelry piece becomes progressively small as and when the wet clay loses moisture until firing and cooling is done.
- Then it’s time for our experts to work on the shape, engravings, design and texture that clay will take. Once the outcome is satisfactory, the work starts on clay for the actual piece
Wedging and Kneading the Clay
After completing the design and setting up the texture, it is time to commence a crucial step. The Clay is wedged and kneaded to remove air trapped inside. Its all also a good time to check if clay has any impurities as sometimes reused clay may have small pieces of wire in it. This task tales up to 20 minutes and lot of strength.
Shape, Design, Check-Repeat
Work now starts on the centerpiece and associated parts as per jewelry design. Prework helps in designing and embellishing the jewelry piece at a faster pace. Previous work on prototype helps to avoid pitfalls and mistakes. Sometimes this does not work out and, its back to drawing board!
It’s Time to Dry, Fire and Cool the Clay
Finally, it’s time to dry the clay naturally. It can take upto 4 days to dry depending on the weather. This is also the time when a flawed design will lose shape or develop cracks. The pieces of jewelry that fails during this process gets tossed back into clay for reusing.
Time for some fire, finally! The pieces are placed in a kiln where the temperature goes upto 800 Celsius. As a result, the clay will transform into firm ceramic pieces. The process for firing followed in our studio is reduction (cutting off oxygen while supplying continuous heat). Due to this process the perfectly fired pieces lose the colour of the clay and acquire a velvety black colour. Kiln and clay pieces are allowed to cool naturally for the next pieces.
Colour the Earth!
The fired and cooled earthenware is ready for final phase of work. The clay pieces are cleaned to remove ashes and other residues before painting them. A base coat of desired colour is then applied. Mostly acrylic colours are used during painting. This ensures that colours do not lose their hue or sheen for next couple of years. Another coat of paint ensures the right finish. Interestingly, colouring the clay enhances any flaws manifolds. Hence, this is also the time for quality check. Any piece that doesn’t meet our high quality standards is discarded. The piece is finally assembled and ready to ship—it’s journey is indeed remarkable from a blob of clay to a thing of beauty exuding charm and elegance
Our entire jewelry making process is aligned to create an elegant, unique, jewelry piece.These graceful natural beauties are available to shop! Start collecting now!
