It’s so incredibly easy to make your own solid sterling silver or gold-filled earwires, so why not? And they make your earrings look great! There’s nothing like hand-crafted earwires to really make people sit up and take notice, and I’m NOT kidding! Continue reading
You can leave a large loop at the bottom of your earring element, so you can hang some dangling bits, called “spoons” and “paddles”, depending upon whether they are beaten or hammered with the ball part of your ballpein hammer, or the pein — flat — part.
A flat dangly bit is a paddle. A curved dangly bit is a spoon. I prefer paddles, because they’re easier and quicker to make and they run little risk of ending up sharp. Spoons must be hand-polished, paddles need no polish if made correctly.
I will run you through the drill for making paddles. Don’t forget that the only different between paddles and spoons is which end of the hammer-head you employ for the hammering.
Here’s what you do: Continue reading
Jewelers in ancient times had various tools available to them, depending upon the culture, the level of culture, the opportunities available to them or to their friends and families, but mostly it rested upon the traditions passed on through the generations.
Jewelers today have the same practices — many secrets are guarded and passed on only from father to son, mother to daughter, aunt or uncle to nieces & nephews. In short, they trust only family with these secrets.
I’ve never subscribed to that tradition. Continue reading
Linking is very basic for anything constructed of wire, and you’d be well-advised to master this skill by making many, many links in copper before trying your skill on silver and gold. How you link is, first cut a convenient and easy to handle length of .22 gauge wire, about ten to twelve inches long.
With your flush-cutter, clip off the very end of the wire with the flush side toward the larger piece. Cut off as LITTLE as possible — every bit of weight counts, both with precious gemstones and precious metals.
Using your needlenose pliers, place the tips about 2 inches from one end of the wire, and gently coax the wire into a bend back onto itself, and then deftly turn the wire and wind it around itself, as shown in the illustration below:
There is no such thing as “scrap”. That’s my opening gambit for how to make a small independent jewelry company pay off well enough to keep you off the welfare rolls for as long as you can produce fine jewelry at a moment’s notice, and with my Method, you’ll be able to turn out splendid product for as long as you can still move your fingers.
“Scrap” is a headspace, a concept of waste mismanagement that can’t survive for very long in a jewelry studio, simply because it’s just too doggone expensive. You need to learn how to conserve energy in the form of effort, but also in the form of gold, silver, copper and gemstones. Continue reading
First of all, you have to have a gold mine somewhere. This is a photo of the Prosperity Mining Claim in Nevada County, California. Note that it’s a nondescript general photo of the small stream on the property. There are no identifiable reference points in the photo — that’s because I don’t intend to give away the location of the mine, because I don’t want swarms of city folks blasting away at the bedrock out of sheer greed.
If you’re taking minerals out, notably gold, lead, silver and iron pyrites, along with several of the heavier gemstones such as garnet, which is used to make carborundum polishing compounds, you have two basic choices, once you’ve located an outcropping or gold ledge — go with heavy equipment and blasting powder, or take a little at a time.
Here’s the thing — gold mining by itself never pays more than survival and a tiny bit extra for sex, booze and camp supplies.
Oh, yes, when you mine full-time, you live there, either in a tent or an expensive home built right on the claim site. Of course, if you give up the claim, you lose the house, unless the claim is patented, and that’s a whole ball of wax right there. I’ll explain: Continue reading
To begin with, an unorganized and messy studio will have a powerful impact on your ability to produce items for the marketplace. If you don’t care what you make or how it turns out or whether it ever gets actually worn, you have no problem working in a junkpile, but if you want to know what resources you have, and you want those resources to be findable, you’ll have to make some decisions about how your workbench will be arranged and what places on the workbench will do what jobs. Continue reading
Gemstones of all kinds are associated with Power Healing, and Rings of Power have been made ever since the Dawn of Time. I make my Healing Rings of Power by mounting a gem-grade drilled stone in a mounting that I have made for well over 7,000 years in this time-space discontinuum. In short, it’s my favorite model of finger-ring, and I make them in absolutely ALL sizes from Size 1 to Size 16, and I’ve made a few even smaller than 1.0 but they’re not measurable by any ring-sizer known. Continue reading