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Bits. Or findings as they are really called. This is what you can use to make your silver clay pieces into jewellery. You might also have heard about fittings - the difference is that a finding is bought readymade, and a fitting is made by hand.
The findings you'll use most will probably be earwires or earpost, jumprings, headpins or eyepins, chain, and clasps. They can be fired, riveted, soldered into place so it becomes a part of the piece, or it can be added by making a hole or other type of holder in the pice which you thread your finding through. It can also be an integral part of the silver clay piece, made in Art Clay or fine silver.
It is important to think of the final design when planning your piece. The positioning of the finding will affect the balance of the piece. For instance, to make a earring hang properly you need to take into account the weight and shape of the piece - if you place a post on the back of a heavy earstud it might flop forward unless you fix the post at the top of the stud.
I would recommend to only use nickel free metals like sterling or fine silver, 18 carat gold, titanium or niobium. Nickel allergy is the most common of contact allergies, and I personally believe you can trigger it to break out by wearing nickel (but I'm not a scientist or a doctor, so don't take my word for it). In my late teens, after wearing cheap costume jewellery (lots of it) I got allergic. At its worst I even got reactions when holding coins, or the metal on a shopping trolley.
Don't use silver or gold plated metals, the plating wears of and underneath is often a nasty nickelheavy metal. Gold filled is slightly different, this is a very thick actual 'cover' of gold - not just a plating, so should be ok to use.
And, it would seem silly to create a beautiful piece of pure silver jewellery, and then add a cheap base metal finding to it, wouldn't it?
Fine silver can be fired with your clay so is very easy to work with. If you use Art Clay 650, and fire it on the lowest recomended temperature you can even fire it with sterling silver, without the sterling getting too much firescale or going brittle.
We now have beatiful fine silver settings for stones, which gives a really professional look to your jewllery. Attach them with paste, fire with the Art Clay, and then set your stone by closing the little prongs around the stone. Otherwise, the lab-created stones we sell can simply be pushed into the clay, and fired with the piece.
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