Turning a blinking inspiration to a jewellery sketch needs aesthetic creativities, while turning a piece of sketch into reality needs nothing but precision and a scientific process.
In old days, jewellers make the precious metal ingot, reform it, reshape it, solder it, and polish it, etc. Now, we inherited the similar conventional process from before but with modern skills. So what is exactly the processing of jewellery making nowadays? Especially in our James & Irisa Jewellery studio, how we realise our designs.
Like they always says a picture worths a thousand words. We illustrated what we are doing in our studio in general below.
Everything starts with an inspiration, like we said in the other article How to design jewellery. We starts our process by drawing ideas on papers. Then we transfer the paper design into wax pieces as we get our final designs ready. Here is what we called The Art of Wax Carving, a process needs precision, patience and a bit of brain work to carve jewellery design out of wax. The art of wax carving has a whole story of its own, which we will talk it in future.
Then it is to transfer wax piece into alloy metal, such as 14 karat yellow gold. In this stage, we use a technique called Lost Wax Casting. This is a very traditional process that has been used many years. But to put it in short, we vaporises the wax and pour the liquified metal into the cavity to cast out our jewellery.
When we get the raw casting pieces, we put an initial cleaning on the piece and start to set our beautiful gems in.
Finally is polishing, accurate polish procedures and correct polish compounds take the most critical role in the whole stage. This will give us a perfect piece of jewellery ready to deliver to customers.
The whole jewellery making process is by no means can be this easy and short in few hundreds of words. This is just an intro to let you know what happens daily in our studio.
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*Artwork ©James & Irisa
