• Roll clay to appropriate thickness.
• Dry clay to plaster dry.
• Place in Satan the Curio.
• Load design, send to Curio.
• Remove cut clay from Curio, release cut design from surrounding extra clay.
• Clean edges and details, add ear posts. Secure ear posts with additional clay.
• Dry clay again.
• Double check for any extra details that need touch up.
• Fire clay in kiln.
• Tumble earrings.
• Polish each piece by hand to high shine for enameling.
• Choose colors for the pair.
• Three-four rounds of laying in and firing enamel. Give or take.
• Grind down surface so metal and enamel are flush and smooth.
• Polish and clean surface to return enamel to high gloss, checking to make sure transparent enamel is still transparent.
• Detail work by hand to refine edges of design.
• Mirror shine metal.
• Trim ear posts.
• Work harden ear posts.
• Select backs.
• Pack for storage or shipping.

And that’s roughly what ONE pair takes. So, definitely still hand made. But Satan the Curio allows me to cut clay in minutes from a digital design, and my digital skills are stronger than my cutting-clay-with-an-exacto-blade skills. So, I have been working on getting that part of the workflow streamlined and running as much like clockwork as possible. So instead of having to spend weeks on designing and prototyping for each and every piece, and having to take that into account with every piece you sell… it breaks down differently.

Is it worth it? Is the $300+ in machinery, $30 a month Adobe subscription (I’m a grown up, I want a legal copy!), and the hours spent designing in front of my little laptop, only to be followed by hours of bench work, is that all worth it?

Yes, because I can scale. 

With a single, one-off piece, that time spent designing and making all should be factored into the price of the final piece. So for a design that took say, a week of work to design and make, with a daily rate of $100 a day ($3000 a month, just barely covers materials and business costs and basic living expenses), that piece is going to cost $500-$700, if you’re working weekends. (I do.)

That piece is unlikely to sell. I can take that price point down – bringing in how some of that for me is learning new skills, etc etc etc. However, I work and design slowly, and that’s unlikely to change. I’m a perfectionist, so slow is how I roll. I go through multiple iterations of a design before I release a final for sale. To only release one means that the costs of producing one single piece are VERY high.

Now, with the workflow I’m refining now? Once I get the first piece down and the prototypes are finished and a final is released, I can repeat it with only the time and material cost of the last part of the process, the cutting, finishing, enameling, polishing. Because I can create more than one, the design costs are spread out over the entire run of that design, reducing the costs significantly. (Time is your biggest factor in prices, or, in other words, my pay check.) Plus, being able to design digitally allows me to refine a design without using metals or materials until I know what I’m after. It works well with being a visual person.

Of course, even when you’re dealing with digital designing, you still have skills that you need to learn and refine. Instead of your traditional pen, I’m digging deeper into Adobe Illustrator’s pen tool and fine-tuning the Silhouette Studio (the software that sends designs to Satan.) I’m converting sketches from my sketchbooks to digital vectors, and learning just how not-even I sketch. So I need to self-correct in Illustrator for my own standards – I make sure both sides are even for designs that are meant to be symmetrical. Or at least, I will be now. I tried to correct for symmetry in Studio, and the result… wasn’t. Heh. Lesson learned. I’m better with Illustrator anyway.

So that’s how my work flow goes now. Designs start off as pencil sketches and become digital vectors, which become Studio files which become cut metal clay which becomes fine silver (or copper or bronze) which then heads to the garage studio and sees traditional bench jeweler work.

I’m pretty happy with how it’s going, and the potential.

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