A brief followup to yesterday's post.

So for those of you who read yesterday's posting and said: "Ha. That guy is just making those things up about selling his new stuff so quickly.", I just wanted to let you know that the new opal earrings shown in yesterday's post sold today. You just have to be quick if you want something new.





Pictured above are some new black South Sea keshi pearls I got in recently. Interested? Don't wait!

New Jewels

If you are a regular customer of mine, it behooves you to keep an eye on my blog. This is where I am posting pictures of my new pieces as they come out. The reason it's advantageous to you is that if you actually want to own some of my new pieces (and this becomes particularly important to those of you who might be looking for Christmas presents) you really have to move quickly if you see something you like. For a variety of reasons the new designs I put out sell much faster than anything else. The South Sea pearl earrings in this recent posting: http://spirerjewelers.blogspot.com/2011/09/shortest-one-of-my-blog-entries-ever.html have already sold to one of my regular (and nicest) customers. Sometimes the new stuff sells so quickly that I don't even have time to get a picture taken of it (well one that someone else takes given my photographic skills).

Obviously one of the reasons new pieces sell so quickly is because my regulars already have a lot of my older designs and when they see something new it moves them. But the other reason is that I'm always excited when something new comes out and (yes I still get excited when I make something new) I tend to show the new stuff more. So even when I get new customers in who might not have seen my work before, I will often show the newest pieces first.

Then there is the other strange thing about retailing, which is that even if I don't show the newer pieces to someone who is in the store for the first time, they often gravitate towards the new items. It's another thing about retailing I just don't understand. It is somewhat akin to my lack of understanding why certain designs seem to cycle into the customer's minds at the same time. Last week I had two different customers come in with diamonds they wanted reset from a variety of pieces they owned and they both picked the same design (something akin to this one here: http://spirerjewelers.com/gallery/rings/Capture_00191.jpg). Now I hadn't sold a set like this since last Christmas and then in the same week I sell two of them! I have this happen with other designs as well. I have some rings that languish for years and then suddenly in a month I'll sell three of them! Perhaps it's something in the water...........

I have a few requests of anyone reading these pages. One is that I'd love for you to become a follower (although for some reason, in a recent change to the system, blogger has stopped showing my list of followers---I'm working on that). The second is that I am always happy to hear both comments from you and suggestions for future topics (and yes I STILL am working on a posting on opal).

Pictured above are 18k and 22k yellow gold earrings with boulder opals.

Problem Solving

Half of my job has nothing to do with making jewelry.  It has to do with problem solving.  I have now been in business for so long that many of my customers have aged a bit and sometimes the actual functinality of pieces can become challenging.  One of my older (both in how long she's been coming to me and in age) customers loves pins and she has quite a few older ones, many of which I have worked on over the years.  However her fingers are no longer as agile as they once were and she has a terrible time manipulating the pin stems, especially when they are short.  A short pin stem is hard to get into a piece of material and then fit into the clasp mechanism and close the clasp.  So one of the things I have tried to do for her over the years is to extend the length of the pins so she can manipulate them easily.  Recently she came in with a piece I had worked on previously.  But the somewhat longer pin stem we had added to it originally was no longer functional.  So she wanted me to devise a solution for her that would allow her to put the pin on more easily.

When she was here I immediately said fine, I can just add a bigger piece behind it and put a longer pin stem on.  But when I actually sat down with the piece I realized it wasn't quite that simple.  First of all because of both my prior work, and possibly other prior work, I could no longer remove the cameo to do work on the piece and hope to get it back in, looking right, and set properly.  So I couldn't solder it onto anything because the heat from my torch would have ruined the cameo.  Additionally because there were open elements of the design that I really didn't want to lose I couldn't just simply attach it to a big piece of flat metal.  So my first thought was to cut out a rectangle, the size of the pin, in the middle.  So I did that.  Only then I had to figure out how I was going to attach the pin to my larger piece of metal without using solder.  At first I considered using rivets but there was no area on the pin that I either wouldn't have ruined trying to rivet (riveting involves hammering a piece of wire down onto a piece) or ruined the design by drilling holes through it for the rivets. Finally I figured out that I could use a prong like attachment to hook it on. This would resolve a number of issues: 1) I wouldn't have to use any solder to attach the piece. 2) I wouldn't have to destroy any part of the original piece to attach it.  3) It would actually get the job done (something always important in my book).  

So if you look closely at the picture (one of mine, apologies) you will see that I ran four prongs up inside the border of her pin and bent them over to hold her pin in place.  So no solder, a bigger pin, and hence much longer pin stem, and success.  And given what I had to work with it looks consistent and pretty.  Can't ask for much more than that.  In this case, it wasn't about making jewelry, just figuring out HOW to make the jewelry.  And now you know why I charge what I do!!! 



Good Diamond Cutting VS. Great Diamond Cutting

As many of you know by now I like to sell ideal cut Lazare Diamonds for most of my diamonds.  I like them because they are always true ideal cuts with very little variations in the cuts.  A lot of what you see online and available elsewhere are diamonds that are called ideal cuts but really don't have the exact angles to qualify as ideal cuts.  The name has become abused and misused everywhere.  However a cutter's art can go far beyond just making sure the angles the stone is cut to are proper. 

I got in a pair of quarter caraters from Lazare the other day for a ring I was making up with an orange sapphire in the center.  I routinely do a Diamond Grading Report for stones that don't come in to me with a laboratory certificate so that when I do an appraisal for my customer on the piece I have proper documentation.  Now with many of the diamonds I sell today this is not always an easy task. Because the clarity grades I am working with are so high, it often takes me awhile to find any inclusions in the stones.  But Lazare is a strict grader and if they say something is a VVS stone, there is usually something there.  VVS clarity stones usually have extremely small pinpoints or other very difficult to locate inclusions in them.  A VVS1 stone is only a step down from a flawless diamond so there really is going to be very little inside the stone to identify it.  A VVS2 stone will have something a little bit larger but still something incredibly difficult to locate.  So my two stones were both VVS2 clarity stones.  It took me about 10 minutes to locate a small inclusion near the culet (the point at the bottom of the stone) on one of them.  But the other one I spent a vast amount of time  looking for anything.  Now if it had been a VVS1 stone I would have said that Lazare was erring on the side of caution and it might really have been a flawless stone, but this one was a VVS2 so I knew they had to have seen something in the stone. 

With stones like these I usually use extremely high magnification to find any inclusions and then back off to 10X to see if I can still see them (10X is the magnification all diamonds are graded at).  I looked at this stone, backwards, forwards in all different types of lighting and just kept getting more and more frustrated.  You should note that with stones in these clarity ranges, you really don't want to mistake a piece of dust for an inclusion, and diamonds are natural dust collectors, so nonstop trips to my steamer to continually clean the stones is part of the process.  Finally after close to a half an hour with the microscope I happened to catch a glimpse of something on the pavilion (bottom) of the stone again near the culet.  Looking at it more closely I finally realized that there was a tiny black needle like inclusion running right up one of the facet junctures. Because it was on the facet junction it was just about impossible to see.

Okay so what does this have to do with cutting a diamond?  Well pretty much everything.  Because of where the inclusion was placed, along a facet junction, it became virtually invisible.  Another cutting operation that pays less attention to this kind of perfection would have allowed the inclusion to end up wherever it was going to.  The stone probably still would have been a VVS2 clarity grade but the inclusion would have been much more visible.  This is one of the subtle differences between good diamond cutting and great diamond cutting.  Which would you rather have:  a VVS2 clarity diamond that has an inclusion right smack dab in the center of the table (albeit tiny) and immediately visible, or a VVS2 clarity diamond that it takes a trained gemologist a half an hour to find the one inclusion in the stone?

Diamonds are not all created equal and diamond cutters have vastly different skills.  Lazare Diamonds uses cutters with great skills and that will always make a difference in the final product. Please think about this when you go out to buy that next sparkly bauble!

The picture above is one of mine (apologies as always).  I made this version of my moonbeams necklace a number of years ago. It has an orange sapphire and diamonds in it.  Usually I do a lighter weight version of this but I had this one in the shop the other day and thought I'd grab a picture of it.

Shortest one of my blog entries ever. Nothing to read, just something to look at.