Oak Leaf Pendants

For ten years, I wore a carved oak leaf made out of antler as a pendant around my neck. I wore through at least one cord, and eventually the pendant itself wore through. I was heartbroken.  I loved that pendant, but my attempts to fix it proved insufficient.

I decided to make a new pendant out of porcelain.  I started by making mock-ups of what I wanted it to look like out of  polymer clay.  Once they were baked, I painted it with mold-release soap, let it dry, and then made a sprig mold with pottery plaster.  The hardest part was cleaning up the leaves after they came out of the mold. The mold didn’t preserve the deeply lobed shape of the leaves, and I had to carve new ones with an exacto knife.  The leaves themselves were extremely fragile.  I made twelve leaves, and only four survived the final firing.  One of them was this rod’s bod clay, which got into my porcelain bucket by mistake.

I’m wearing one of these pendants right now, but I’ve already started to make new ones, as this is about 4 millimeters longer than I wanted it to be.