Happy Holidays!

18k and 22k yellow gold ring with boulder opal

My lack of writing new articles here is because I have been so busy with custom work this season.  The pictures here are of a new boulder opal ring that I designed up for a customer.  The opal is an absolutely stunning stone.  This piece was made up for a woman with small hands and I spent quite some time pondering ideas for an approach.   I had started in one direction with it but wasn't pleased so I put it aside for a bit.  One morning I woke up at about 5 am and it came to me what I was going to do with it to both make it wearable and beautiful. 

One side view of opal ring

The other side!

I did however also want to bring up another topic this morning as it is that season when people tend to come in at the last minute looking for presents.  I often get people in who look at what I have out and ask if I have a lot more jewelry put away in the back.  Or I get someone in who saw something on the website, or previously saw something in the store and it's been sold and they want to know if I have a few more pieces just like it.

I do wish I could magically conjure up new pieces at the drop of a hat.  But the reality is that I hand make my own product here in my shop.  I don't have a shop in Asia somewhere producing hundreds or thousands of my designs daily that can just be shipped here and pulled out of the box in back to replace a piece when I sell it.  I don't have any machines that magically reproduce my designs by the hundreds. I do repeat my designs but I still have to actually physically make them up.  That is one of the things that make my product so unique.  I understand that it is contrary to the way people want to shop now where they just push a button on a computer and voila! a new toy is on the way to you.  However it is just the way I like to do things.  I may be a merchant but, more importantly, I am someone who believes in hand crafting a unique product meant to salve the soul.   I've written before about how much I like to actually make jewelry.  I like to make it because of the satisfaction it brings to me both in the process of creation, but also in the knowledge that someone will take a piece of me with them when they leave my shop with one of my creations.

So if you come into my shop, I'm always happy to make something up for you if I don't have quite what you are looking for.  But I do have many designs out at all times that all allow you to take a small piece of me home with you.   

I hope everyone has a great holiday this year.  If you didn't find something from me under the tree at Christmas (or under the candles at Chanukah), I think New Year's is a great time to gift yourself!!

New From Old

I often talk about how I am happy to take in old gold pieces you might own and give you a scrap credit towards new work I can do for you.  I have also often talked about how I am happy to work with your stones as I believe firmly you retain the most amount of value by keeping them.   So here are some pictures of what I can do for you.  One of my regular readers (Hi Helen!) brought in some old gold and stones she had:

gold scrap

If you look at the small pile in the lower center of the picture you'll see two pieces with diamonds in them and a jade pendant.  Helen wanted to reuse these stones and some of my fancy colored sapphires in a pendant design based on my black mobe pearl rings pendant:

18k and 22k gold  pendant with South Sea black mobe pearl, sapphires, diamonds and emerald.

I was able to give Helen a $900 credit towards the job and this is what I came up with for her:

18k and 22k yellow gold pendant with jade, diamonds and fancy colored sapphires

I enjoyed working on this project because I happen to like the design to begin with, I was able to utilize a number of her stones in it, and we came up with something that was beautiful all at the same time. 

So if you have a bunch of old stuff lying around somewhere bring it in and let's see what we can work out together!

Reticulation

The pendant pictured here was made using a jewelry technique known as reticulation.  Reticulation is one of the more enjoyable, but random, things that can be done with metal.  Although certain gold alloys can be reticulated, the way I do it is to use a traditional 800/200 mix of fine silver and copper (sterling silver is 925/75 fine silver/copper) to actually make the pieces and then I have the ones (or parts of them) that I like cast in gold. Long ago when I first started doing reticulated pieces I had to make my own reticulating alloy to work with.  Now, since a lot of the oddball techniques that I have been doing for 40 years have become more mainstream, my refiner actually offers a reticulating silver to work with.  The process is time consuming in that you have to heat and pickle (throw the metal in an acid bath) repeatedly (10-20 times) so as to build up a layer of fine (pure) silver on the surface. This means that the melting point of the surface metal is higher than the metal underneath it.  After the heating/pickling process is finished, the piece of metal is then heated until the metal underneath begins to melt.  If you're lucky you can actually exercise some control over how the metal moves as the molten metal begins to fold up on itself but the top layer remains somewhat rigid.  If you're not lucky you can still get a lot of interesting results.  And if you're really unlucky it doesn't work at all and just rolls up into a molten mass of metal.  (Try this for a tongue twister: rolling molten mass of metal!) 

Once the silver piece is finished, I usually cut out the shape I want (sometimes the actual shape of the piece I want, sometimes a larger one that I can cut into smaller pieces).  Then it goes off to my casting company who make a mold of the piece and send me back some nice cast ones in 18k or 22k yellow gold.  The pendant above was made up because I had an old customer come in recently with some reticulated earrings I had made awhile ago and he wanted a matching pendant.  I made one for him and put the one above out into my cases.  I'm also currently in the process of trying to come up with some reticulated wedding bands for the cases.  I haven't gotten the metal doing quite what I want yet (I have a few of those rolling molten masses of metal lying around) for the rings but as soon as I do I'll get a picture posted. The picture above, incidentally is thanks to my new assistant, Kady, who it turns out is far more skilled than I am at photography (well just about everyone is more skilled than I am at it, but Kady is quite good and has a part time job actually doing some photography work as well). 

I haven't been writing for awhile because I have continued to be swamped with work.  However there is some end in sight and I am hoping to get a few new articles up soon. I plan on doing another one about selling/scrapping your jewelry as it seems to be a constant topic in the store these days, and I still hope to get an article on opals up.  Actually I have some new opal earrings that Kady took a picture of for me that would make a nice heading for it so let me see what I can do.  I also have some new South Sea pearl earrings made up that I have a nice picture of as well---they'll be headlining whatever the next article is about. 

The piece pictured above is 18k yellow gold with four .03 ct. ideal cut, "E" color, VS clarity diamonds.  Come by the shop if  you want to see it in person.