March Meet The Maker - 2 - Style

I’m liking how this year’s March Meet The Maker isn’t on every day. It means I’m not spending every evening worrying that I haven’t written tomorrow morning’s post!

Anyway, prompt number 2 is STYLE, so something I can quite easily waffle on about for a bit!

I think my style has evolved over the years, but my textured surfaces and wavy edged pieces of jewellery have become quote recognisable that they’re ‘mine’. At the end of 2023 I did a short introduction to hand engraving course, and although I haven’t had any further formal training, I’ve been practicing the techniques I learned on the course…adapting, refining and really making them my own. I’m now loving adding my own style of I guess a kind of hybrid hand carving and engraving to my commissioned pieces.

This technique has worked beautifully for my “River” inspired pieces, and I’m now able to carve and engrave those beautiful curving shapes, rather than cutting them out of a separate layer of metal. I think this gives much more refined edges and it also wastes a lot less material, meaning that more of my clients gold stays as part of their commissioned pieces rather than ending up as dust on my bench!

I’m not going to give away all my secrets, but essentially, I start my engraving by drawing on the design in pen, then I use a burr to roughly carve out the shape, before finishing it with hand gravers. I know there are laser engraving machines that could do the same job in a few minutes, but actually, it’s not the same…

My jewellery is organic and full of movement. Theres no flat surfaces, straight lines or absolutely perfect edges or angles. A machine though would give me just that, which really wouldn’t give me the right aesthetic.

Hand engraving (in fact hand ‘making’ full stop) is also a dying craft and if we don’t work to preserve these skills, soon nobody will know how to make anything that can’t be done by asking a computer to create it!!