More about Kate and PMC

Precious metal clay, or PMC, is fine silver metal clay with which you make metal objects. For jewellery makers, it means you can make your own clasps and toggles. It's just another way to differentiate your work from someone else's and express your own individuality.

Of course, for Kate McKinnon, it's much more than just making findings - she makes entire pieces of jewellery from the PMC - necklaces, rings, bracelets. Check out her website to see what she does - I especially love her architectural pieces.

Here are some pictures from the first class in PMC that I took with Kate, in May at Beadfx. One shot is of Kate with some of her tools and the other is of some of the pieces I made.

She was in Toronto teaching for 5 days but I didn't hear about it until the night before the first class and was only able to attend for one day, but I was fascinated by the process and knew I wanted to do more.

I was checking out her website a few days later and noticed she was going to be teaching a week long class in southern France at the end of July. Since I had just been to Paris at the end of March and was looking for an excuse to go back to France, I thought taking Kate's class sounded like a fabulous idea. I took a deep breath, signed up for the course, went to France and it was amazing! The people, the PMC, the village of Durfort, the flea markets, the countryside - everything was tres magnifique (but more about that trip later).