vrijdag 4 mei 2012

stones and settings

A thing I really love doing, yet is a stressy job, is removing gemstones from jewellery to be re-used.
It's stressy because you sometimes do rough work to get them free, and so you can easily damage the stones.
One splintered to pieces when I just bended the ring itself a little, luckely it was a very cheap stone and hardly re-usable, because it was so dirty and scratched on the surface.
The diamonds of course can handle a lot more, yet even they can break because of pressure.

These, are all the stones I had recuperated from the antique jewellery.

But, my day was filled with even more gemstones, for then my boss gave me the assignment to make settings for these lovelies.
I myself am not a fan of the colour red in general, but I just love Garnet.
The glow Garnet gives, tends to lean toward a warm shade of brownish-orange . That in combination with the deep blood red gives the stone such a lively and warm effect.


Yet, making settings is one of the jobs I dislike the most.
Not only does it take forever, you have to be super careful and concentrated when working.
No talking or joking when making settings!
( I guess things will go a lot smoother though once I'm more experienced. Remember everyone I'm still a beginner! )


What makes everything more difficult is the fact I was working with silver.
When aiming your flame on just one part of the piece, the entire piece heats up rapidly.
Do, when you need pinpoint precission when soldering, things do get a little exciting.
You ahve to solder one piece of wire at a time, yet when working on the second, third or last one, you need to be super carefull not to heat the piece too much, or everything falls apart again.
also because the piece is so small, the heating goes even faster.
Plus, once that's done, you need to solder another oval underneath the piece, just a hair away from where you just soldered the wires.


only managed to get 5 pieces by the end of the day.
But, do note that preparing the wires and making the ovals takes a lot of time as well.
plus you ahve to measure everything perfectly, for the stones must fit in perfectly as well.
Luckely, the size of the garnet stones were all the same, so I only needed to measure one to get started.
(it sucks when each stone has a different size... )

However, At the start of the year I also had to make something similar, and I wasn't able to get this far. plus my pieces were burned and un usable.
Back then I had to retry a lot, because everything fell apart when I was getting close to the end.
Now, I only had to re adjust some wires that had fallen to the side a little, but that's about it!

So, today I proved to myself and my boss that I've improved a lot.
My boss as well told me I'm doing wonderful, and that he has high hopes for me.
hooray!

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