Tiny Birds Jewelry

Unique, one-of-a-kind porcelain sculpted tiny bird jewelry.

I found that my hands and eyes have a feel for the form, posture, and motion of birds. And I love them in flight. All of their motion. How they are an essential part of our shared planet. How we are dependent upon them. Flocks of birds make my heart sing.

Hand Crafted Porcelain – One-of-a-Kind Tiny Birds Jewlery

Decades ago I was married to a potter who one day took a lump of clay and began to sculpt some very primitive looking birds. I said, “give me that. I can do better” and so I have been sculpting miniature birds from porcelain off and on for nearly fifty years. I seem to have a feel for the form of birds.

Each tiny bird is individually hand sculpted using just fingers, toothpicks and a pottery needle, then they are bisqued, painted, glazed and high-fired. They all have holes for beading. The bird beads are usually about an inch or two long. Some are representational and some are more generic.

Sculpting these tiny birds makes me happy and is my meditation…

Making the birds – which are also beads – is the first part of my work. The second part is making jewelry with them. Raise by a rock hound, I also have a great love of stones – especially the lustrous ones. Working with the colors, sheen, and patterns of stone beads combined with the birds maybe the part I love most. Beauty everywhere is like air to me – in my home, my gardens, nature, color, my jewelry, – and I create it everywhere.

The Process

Porcelain clay is much finer in texture than regular clay (stoneware clay) and therefore takes on much finer detail, so porcelain is my clay of choice. I start a making a bird with a small lump of damp clay and begin by first forming its general head, body and tail shape using just fingers and eyes. Then I add wings and begin the detailed wing and feather work using sanded toothpicks and a pottery needle. At this point the birds are entirely fragile. Holes are made in them at this point so that they become beads.

The sizes range from 3/4” to 2”. If I am making earrings or a necklace with several birds, I measure each lump of clay before forming them so that they match in size one they are finished.
Once they are thoroughly dried, they are low fired (bisqued) in a small kiln where they begin the transformation from soil to essentially stone. They are only partially hardened, and at this point they are painted using first underglaze stains for their colors and then a light clear glaze over them. Then they are high fired to 2200 degrees F. and hopefully come out of the kiln to my satisfaction. I usually reject about a third of them because I don’t like the way the glazing came out or I didn’t take enough care in the forming of them.

Birds I make for necklaces are usually representational, but many of the birds made for earrings and pendants are non-representational. Although birds frequently come close to me, I use bird books for detail information. Although I reference many different bird books, my favorite is my huge original Audubon and my copy is in tatters from decades of use. I love Audubon most because he took poetic license with his illustrations. His paintings of birds were art as well as scientific information and therefore suit my artistic needs in creating wearable works of art.