Make Your Own Silver Jewellery

Make Your Own Silver Jewellery is a tutorial guide and primer to de-mystifying silverwork using precious metal clay (artclay, PMC) presented by Monica Weber-Butler. Due out 30th Nov 2021 from Pen & Sword on their White Owl imprint, it's 192 pages and will be available in paperback format. 

I was trained as a gold-/silversmith (mostly traditional goldsmith) before PMC was really widely available. I can remember being excited by the amazing possibilities as a (relatively) young jeweler, but the constraints of family and production work meant that I didn't ever find the time to take a workshop. My second career as a medical bionerd meant that my jeweller days were relegated to hobby status and so this workshop-in-a-book was perfect for my needs. 

The author proceeds logically and accessibly: a good safety and materials introduction leads into technique and design chapters with good overviews of theory of design, balance, and originality. In the tutorial chapters, the author emphasizes design and inspiration throughout instead of slavishly following instructions for cookie-cutter identical results. The designs presented here utilise premade findings and/or simple cold-forged connectors, jump rings, beads and other components for finished jewellery. The technique tutorial for using ferrules to make shaped clay cutters is really useful and probably worth the price of the book on its own. 

There are techniques and finishings, projects, and design info shown in this book which are applicable to other crafts such as polymer clay, pottery, papercrafts, mixed-media, sculpture, and more. For making the projects as shown in this book with fine silver clay, readers should expect to expend some effort to first acquire the basic tools and materials. After acquiring (or borrowing) the minimum toolkit, the projects will be very cost effective.

Four and a half stars. This would be a good choice for public or school library acquisition, maker's groups, and home studios. 

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.