Keep your syringes standing with the tip in a glass of water when you're not using them. Remember to put it back as soon as you stop extruding so the tip doesn't dry out.
When fired, the syringe shrinks about 10-12% which helps enhance fine details. It can be fired with a gas torch, on a gas hob, or in a kiln.
Adding different tips lets you extrude fine, medium and large sized clay ropes/snakes. You can find optional syringe tips here.
I love having a syringe on hand in my studio, I use it for decoration and also doing finish patching in pieces. I keep it stored in a little bottle with the tip barely submerged in water so it does not get hard and this keeps it perfectly and it lasts a good while.
This was a top up for my 10g silver syringe (misjudged how many things I'd want to make!) and it was great. Takes a little bit to get used to syringing things, but I can honestly say it's something I'm going to be doing more of! I used this pack to make 3 small neckalce outline-pendants (think, size of a 10p, not solid) Easy to fire at home, and polish up!
... for smaller decorative parts. For the larger parts you will mostly use the "normal" clay - at least, I do...
The 5gr size is a more economical way of buying syringe clay especially if you save the tips from an old syringe. It's surprising how much you can do with 5grams, keep the tip standing in water and you can keep them for a long time without drying out.
Great for adding small details, accessing hard to reach places. Very easy to use. Nice consistency.
you need more than one - does anyone know how to clean the tip so you can swap? Definitely good to have separate tips but you need one syringe per tip so you have to have more than you would use. The clay gradually soaks down into the water you keep the syringes in. Can't we have a tip cover too - I could keep them in an airtight plastic container then, with damp tissue, of course. *****RESPONSE FROM METAL CLAY***** You can store the syringe in a glass of water, any silver that eventually seeps out will fall to the bottom of the glass so can be recycled into silver paste (which you can use to repair broken clay, to paint on back of leaves, lace and other burnable materials to create fine silver replicas). After silver has gathered for a while, and it is settled at the bottom, pour out as much water as possible, then using a clay shaper scrape out the silver 'sludge' into a paste pot. You can also leave it to dry out completely and scrape it out, and then reconstitute it into paste with a little water. There shouldn't be much silver coming out of the tip though. You might want to give the plunger of the syringe a very gentle tug upwards before you set the syringe in the water to pull the clay back into the tip. It isn't recommended to store clay in a removed tip for a longer period of time, then it is better to clean it out; using a pointed tool scrape out as much as possible and put in a paste pot. The last bit can be rinsed in your syringe glass, and then you reclaim all the silver at the bottom of the glass in one go. You could store syringes wrapped in a tiny bit of cling film, covered in wet tissue and then in a airtight container or plastic bag - but personally I prefer the glass solution.
