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!

Mokume Gane

I've spent some time recently looking over some other jeweler's blogs and once again had my feelings reinforced about what I don't want my blog to become. Almost universally, they are discussions of a piece recently made, usually with pictures of the work in progress. Now this is all well and good. I'm sure that a lot of people are intrigued by how jewelry is made and it's great self promotion to show what goes into making the items we produce as jewelers. But generally speaking, it's not the direction I like to go in. I prefer to talk about my MOTIVATION for making a piece. I also like to talk about subjects that I think will help my customers buy any piece of jewelry (not just mine). But today I'm going to throw all that out the window and talk about one of the techniques I use to actually make some of my pieces. Why? Because I said I would in my last posting.

Mokume gane is a Japanese metal layering technique that has been used for thousands of years in making both jewelry and ornamental objects. Mokume means woodgrain and gane means metal so the description is woodgrain metal. That is exactly what a lot of it can look like. It used to be that almost all mokume gane work was done with a variety of less expensive metals, copper, silver and a number of oddball alloys that the Japanese had developed. More recently it has been done with precious metals. There are some jewelers who specialize in mokume gane and do some absolutely stunning things with it. They have taken the technique to whole new levels. Using ovens to carefully bond their metals together over long periods of time, they have come up with some new ways of using mokume and a variety of new looks for it. With modern advances in technology, their ability to produce perfect billets of mixed metals to work with is impressive.

However I don't want to spend my entire life doing one process. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons I can please so many different types of customers is because I work in a variety of styles. While some of my work is immediately recognizable as mine, a lot of it is just nice jewelry. And that's what I like to do. I'd be bored to tears if all I did was one particular technique. So I leave that for the other jewelers who specialize in it, but I do have a particular mokume that I enjoy making and that I produce routinely.

Basically what you do in mokume gane is create a piece of metal with a large number of layers of different colors of metal and then peel away parts of it to see the layers underneath. I do this by starting with a piece of my special 22k yellow gold mix and a piece of the 18k palladium white gold I use. I've found these two metals fuse together better than some others, given the conditions I'm working in. I then fuse the two layers together using my torch in a process in which I heat the two metals until they are almost liquid and they actually fuse together. Then I cut the piece in half and fuse them again. I do this until I get either 16 layers or 32 layers of metal. This metal is then rolled down (in a mill) until it is fairly thin. I then take a dapping die (a small tool I use with a hammer that has a ball on the end) and punch out a series of rows of holes (they don't go all the way through) in the metal. The piece is then flipped over and ground off on the top. This allows the different layers to show through.

I really enjoy making mokume gane because it involves a lot of torch work (I admit, I have somewhat of a fascination with working with a lot of fire) and it is just generally fun for me to do. It's technically advanced (trying to get the metal to fuse properly with a torch is tricky---most mokume today is produced in controlled ovens), it's always a little different and I can do some neat things with the results.

In the three ring picture only the top ring is mokume gane. That is a 32 layer mix. The earrings are a 16 layer mix.