March Meet The Maker - Detail

Today’s March Meet The Maker prompt is all about detail, which pretty much sums up every piece of jewellery I make! Detail and quality finish are just the most important part of making and also what takes the most time but oh so worth it. I spend many hours filing, and polishing up tiny parts of my jewellery under my microscope so that when you look at it with the naked eye, the tiny details are perfect and quality of finish is as flawless as it can possibly be. Those wavy edges and textured surfaces aren’t there to cover up marks and scratches. They’re all carefully thought out and added “after” I’ve polished everything up so that the texture is exactly where I want it to be.

Even after I “think” I’ve got all the marks out, polishing can often reveal that actually I haven’t, and I have to go back and re-do it. Can you spot the tiny flaws on the shiny marquise stone setting? This is really what you pay for when you buy a piece of hand made fine jewellery. I’m pretty sure if you took a photo of a piece of mass produced or market stall jewellery this close up, you would see many more imperfections than you do here.

The other photos show how tiny some of the settings that I have to make are. I could possibly just buy something ready made that would do the job, but it would be made from new metal and not recycled from my client’s jewellery. Also “doing the job” isn’t really good enough for me. Each stone may be a slightly different size, so each setting is made to fit it perfectly. I can always tell when a piece of jewellery has been created using ready made settings, and if I can tell, so can other people!

Finally, I thought you might like to see a photo of the “almost” finished set of rings. I say almost finished as one of these needs to go back to the Assay Office as they forgot to hallmark it, so all the final polishing (I’m sure you can see theres still a few flaws) will be done when I get it back.