The Highs and Lows of Making Jewellery
Much as we get immense satisfaction from making beautiful contemporary jewellery, there are so many stages in the process that are potential disaster areas, one wrong move and its back to the drawing board. This is why making jewellery, like any craft which involves a high degree of skill, experience and luck is so exciting.
When we were starting out we used to keep a punch bag next to the workbench. If a client asked what it was for I’d tell them that it helped me to stretch my back after sitting still for hours at a time. However, its actual purpose was for venting my anger when things went pear shaped. You’d be surprised at the amount of damage that a speck of solder, the size of a grain of sand, could cause when it suddenly developed a mind of its own and ran in the wrong direction. A 1mm faceted peridot which I’d spent ages setting on the inside of a wedding band would crack as I was burnishing the setting edge and the whole thing would have to be smashed out. We like to think we are patient people but sometimes rather than flinging a day’s work across the workshop, a good session with the punch bag would allow me to vent my rage and then crack on with the job in hand.
That was almost twenty years ago now and those bouts of frustrated anger have given way to a slightly calmer acceptance that fate isn’t always on your side and generally speaking everything works out in the long run. I did laugh the other day when I was visiting a stone setter we use in Hatton garden. He has the incredibly fiddly job of micro setting stones using a microscope, as I was leaving I spotted a punch bag in the corner of his studio. Been there I thought to myself!
Despite the highs and lows, the final pieces always fill us with pride, like this dress ring set with yellow Beryl we made for a client recently, lots of fiddly processes involved but the end result was well worth the trouble.
To see more examples of our work visit www.janareinhardt.com
Posted on June 12 2013
When we were starting out we used to keep a punch bag next to the workbench. If a client asked what it was for I’d tell them that it helped me to stretch my back after sitting still for hours at a time. However, its actual purpose was for venting my anger when things went pear shaped. You’d be surprised at the amount of damage that a speck of solder, the size of a grain of sand, could cause when it suddenly developed a mind of its own and ran in the wrong direction. A 1mm faceted peridot which I’d spent ages setting on the inside of a wedding band would crack as I was burnishing the setting edge and the whole thing would have to be smashed out. We like to think we are patient people but sometimes rather than flinging a day’s work across the workshop, a good session with the punch bag would allow me to vent my rage and then crack on with the job in hand.
That was almost twenty years ago now and those bouts of frustrated anger have given way to a slightly calmer acceptance that fate isn’t always on your side and generally speaking everything works out in the long run. I did laugh the other day when I was visiting a stone setter we use in Hatton garden. He has the incredibly fiddly job of micro setting stones using a microscope, as I was leaving I spotted a punch bag in the corner of his studio. Been there I thought to myself!
To see more examples of our work visit www.janareinhardt.com
