A comprehensive introduction to the medium designed specifically for crafters and jewellery makers, detailing the essentials of working, firing and finishing metal clay to create beautiful jewellery and decorative objects. Artist and instructor Sherri Haab demonstrates metal clay's remarkable versatility, showing how it can be textured, moulded, carved and sculpted to create gorgeous beads, bracelets, pendants, earrings, rings and other jewellery settings, and boxes and vessels. She also reveals how to combine metal clay with polymer clay, glass and epoxy resin to create unique mixed-media pieces. Developed in Japan in the early 1990s, metal clay represents a dramatic development in the handling of precious metals for jewellery making. Metal clay consists of microscopic particles of silver or gold suspended in a pliable organic binder that can be worked with the hands and simple household tools, eliminating the need for difficult metalworking processes such as soldering, hammering and cutting. When metal clay is fired, the binder burns away and the metal particles fuse into pure (0.999) metal.