This day of the dead ring was among the more nerve-wracking commissions I’ve done.The 2,000 year old glass was supplied to me in a pendant setting, and was to be reused and set into a sterling silver ring.With such a precious, irreplaceable “stone” a decision was made to leave it in its original setting, and…
This was an interesting pendant design in that my client wanted the company logo engraved onto a silver disc. StormFishMarine are specialists in scuba-diving training and have a jolly Roger style of emblem. Artwork supplied The logo supplied was a pixel-based image whereas we needed a vector format (mathematical lines rather than pixels). Redraw To…
Brief Create an elephant pendant in sterling silver with three elephants – one adult and two juniors. We started off with some ideas on style and then worked on how the three might interact to form a solid enough piece for the pendant. The final piece The result was really sweet. It captured some of…
The Brief This was a fun commission to do. The request was for a WI Brooch and as my client is an artist, the drawing supplied was great! The artwork The rough drawing supplied was a little tricky to turn into a vector. The tonal values worked in pencil and finding an equivalent line in…
The jewellery studio and shop now offers: I don’t work in platinum or tungsten and cannot repair plated jewellery. I do have testing facilities to determine what grade of metal your jewellery is. With my focus so set on getting commissions completed it has been easy to forget how much work went into getting the…
During some late night casting I pushed the limit on one of my crucibles. I was casting two gold earrings which were proving a little troublesome and thought I could get just one more pour, but in silver, out of the graphite crucible. Crucibles tend to get ropier with each use and mine finally died…
A jeweller is also a sculptor The fun and challenging thing about my day to day work is that it constantly pushes me to learn new skills. One of those is sculpture. I’ll often be asked to create something in 3D and that makes the whole piece a lot more challenging to create as there…
A client brought me several gold pieces of jewellery that she’d inherited and asked me to make a piece that she would wear and remind her of her family. There are more steps involved with repurposing client gold but often the colour of the resulting gold is fabulous and different colour. An earring design was…
Type: Pendant Commission Materials: Sterling Silver Based on the original sheet metal dragonfly, the series was cast from a master prototype and then each one customised. I’ve just recently finished a sterling silver dragonfly pendant set for a South African member of the family, Margie. All my commissions are special but this one more so….
Westmorland County Show 2017 The Westmorland Show for year was another great one. The weather was good, Prince Charles popped in and generally everyone had a great time. We didn’t get to chat to Prince Charles but did see him through the crowd. Managed to get hold of some biltong – which is quite unusual…