Drawing inspiration from nature and other artists, Joyce spends her downtime sketching on her iPad or in her sketchbook. Her sketches don’t follow a sequential order: centerpieces, colors, and the shape of the earrings have all had their fair share of taking the lead and the rest of the factors follow.

While there are endless sketches, sometimes they don’t work out! At that point, she takes the components that she enjoys and creates a new draft, or lets them go. Since creating art wiIh joy is the foundation that Hanging Orchid is built upon, the drafts that make it out of the page are ones that she loves and are excited to create.

Being intentional forces her to slow down and remain grounded so that each piece can be made tenderly.

Once she designs a piece that she is excited to create, Joyce begins making prototypes. The prototypes allow her to put practice into reality.

The very first step is creating the clay color palette that resembles her sketches. She plays with mixing different ratios of the primary colors, black, and white. A palette of 9 colors can take around 4 hours to get right.

Depending on the piece, prototyping can take up to 7-8 hours. The more details there are, the longer it takes. Her favorite part about creating prototypes is that they never look exactly like the sketches! She adjusts her designs during this process from experimenting with limitations of space, minuscule details, and cohesiveness. Since creating a handful of earrings of the same design can be redundant, the prototype is considered final once it accurately executes her vision and is fun for her to create more than once.

Joyce only makes a handful of pairs for each design, which makes her pieces one-of-a-kind! She tries to design a piece each month, but realistically averages one every two months. The most common question she gets is “how long does it take for you to make a pair?” And the anticlimactic answer is, “it depends!” After the sketch & design and prototyping process, there’s still creating the actual piece, and two other major steps before the earrings are finished.

Conditioning the clay so that it can be soft enough to work with takes about 10 minutes per color.

1 flower ranges from anywhere between 15 minutes and 1 hour to create. For example, one single rose takes about 15 minutes to make. On the other hand, one single marigold flower takes 1 hour to make: each petal is sculpted to have a color gradient, shaped, and detailed. Then, after creating the petals, they have to be assembled together into a whole flower.

Leaves take about 2-3 minutes each to sculpt and detail.

One animal can take between 30 minutes to 1 hour to make. The more details there are, the longer they take. Each dove takes about 30 minutes to sculpt.

Landscape paintings take about 4 hours to make for every 2 pairs of the same design. Joyce blends a flat gradient of colors together to create the canvas. Then, she paints intricate trees, clouds, grass, and dynamic mountains. She spends time making sure that there are a variety of textures and colors to differentiate between the foreground, background, and canvas. She pays close attention to the textures to make it as realistic as possible.

Many of her landscape paintings are framed to resemble paintings in an art gallery. Sculpting frames for each pair takes an average of 1 hour.

Baking time takes anywhere between 15-20 minutes depending on the type of clay and size.

After the earrings are created and baked, any excess clay on the edges are cut off carefully with an X-Acto knife and are sanded for a smooth edge. The time this process takes varies by the size and shape of the earring pieces. Smaller, circular pieces take longer (ironically) due to the handling and curves. A simple rectangular earring takes about 5 minutes to sand while the moon phase earrings shown in the collage have taken an hour total.

For earrings that have silver or gold finishes, each pair takes about 30 minutes to paint and seal. They are most commonly on landscape earrings with frames, although not all are polished. There is charm in both frames that are left in their original clay state and frames that have an antique or shiny sheen.

Any dangles are hand-drilled, which takes about 3 minutes each pair. Any earrings that have multiple components can take longer. The moon phase dangles took about 20 minutes total to drill and assemble.

The earring “finding” assembling time is the most variable - ranging from 1 minute to 45 minutes to complete.

Ball posts take 1 minute to assemble for dangle earrings.

Stud backings take 30 minutes to apply for each pair. They have to be secured by another layer of clay, which can become messy. Much of the time goes into making the clay backing more aesthetically pleasing. The earring has to head into the oven afterwards for another re-bake.

Gold filled or sterling silver ear wires take 45 minutes per pair to assemble. Joyce takes the wires and hand shapes them into earring backings. She then dulls the ends to ensure they can enter into ears smoothy!

This is the final stage before the earring can be listed and shipped!