In the jewellery workshop: Kitchen finds
As both The Great British Menu and The Great British Bake Off return to our screens, we’ve been thinking about food this week and as a result noticing how much useful kitchen equipment migrates to the workshop.
For example, anyone who works with polymer clay will have long given up on fantasies of creating fresh pasta – the pasta roller has long been in use for tempering clay and generally the family doesn’t appreciate the idea of food with colourful plastic additions.
Looking round our workshops we came up with the following list of kitchen items we use:
- Slow cooker for keeping pickle warm
- Pyrex mixing bowls – cooling heated metal, washing metal clay after firing, sanding using wet and dry papers
- Gas torch – annealing metal, firing metal clay
- Cutters – working with metal clay and polymer clay
- Sieves – placing items in pickle, rinsing pieces, cleaning items in ultrasonic machine
- Kitchen timer – firing metal clay, enamelling, heating Perspex or reusable moulding compounds
- Hot plate – working with metal clay
- Food dehyrdrator – drying metal clay
- Toaster oven – baking polymer clay
- Fancy ice cube trays – creating interesting resin shapes
- Silicone muffin trays – this is a new one for us but one of our tutors has been using these with reuseable moulding compound. She needed something heat resitant and flexible but fairly small to create some moulds of rings for working with resin.
What other kitchen items have you used for jewellery making? Please tell us below