We are open late tonight and tomorrow is NoDaWeen! We have a ton of new Jewelry in the cases. We are running a special for the Cheap Treat Crawl on November 5th. This night will be extra special, as Erich Moffitt will be gracing our walls with his amazing artwork!
As always we will be available for all of your jewelry repair and Custom design needs. We have been playing with a lot of textures lately and here is an example of one of the new pieces. This Custom made, reticulated silver pendant is one of our favorite pieces. Reticulation is a process that involves controlled heating with a torch on a piece of sterling silver. As the metal heats, copper rises to the surface and is then pickled away. The heating and pickling occur several times, until the surface becomes pure silver. The melting point of pure silver is higher than that of the sterling silver, still at the core. As the sterling core melts, the surface helps the piece maintain its integretity. Instead of melting down, the piece wrinkles, allowing for the beautiful peaks and valleys to form, and creating one-of-a-kind reticulated silver jewelry! Please come visit us tonight and over the weekend to check out all the new work!
As promised in an earlier post , here is some video of the actual casting part of making a cast piece of jewelry. Before this step, a model must be created. The model can be carved from wax or be some sort of organic material, both of which burn away at the temperatures reached inside the kiln shown in the video. Before the models go into the kiln, they are invested. Investing is the process of surrounding the model inside a steel flask in which you pour liquid investment. Investment is a silica based type of very fine plaster. After the investment air dries for 2 hours, the flask or flasks go into the kiln for a typical 10-12 hour burn out cycle that reaches temperatures close to 1400 degrees. Once that cycle comes to an end the temperature is lowered to around 850 degrees to prepare for casting. The flask is removed from the kiln and in this case molten silver is forced into the negative space left behind by the model, either with centrifugal force or by vacuum. We use a vacuum system at Custom. After allowing some time for the molten silver to cool, it is quenched in a bucket of water. The thermal shock of the still hot investment when submerged in water explodes it outwards and leaves you with your new piece of cast jewelry.
One of the goals here at the Custom jewelry store other than providing every imaginable jewelry related service including jewelry repair, jewelry cleaning/refurbishing, watch repair, and more, is to be able to fill our showcases with jewelry designed and made in house. Being able to cast is essential to doing that. We will be posting some video in a later post with an inside look into how some of the process is performed.
Most jewelry repairs are simple soldering jobs or ring sizings. This one was much more difficult as far as repairs go, and required an almost total Custom ring fabrication. The ring started out as an 18k and platinum diamond engagement ring and the customer wanted it changed to all platinum with a Fingermate adjustable shank. The Fingermate shank allows the ring to open and close so it fits snugly on fingers with large knuckles. The Fingermate brand of adjustable shank tend to be more expensive than the other options, but in our experience we have found them to work far better, for far longer than other brands when installed correctly. They are quite difficult to install correctly and I encourage anybody reading this to seek out an experienced bench jeweler with many years of jewelry repair experience to install one if you can not make it to our Custom jewelry store.
This is an example of a duplication of a wedding band. The original engagement ring and wedding band were passed down through the family and the customer wanted a second, matching white gold band for her vintage ring. The first and third pictures are of the original vintage ring, the second and forth are of the new Custom duplicate ring.
Tonight is the second gallery crawl since we have been open, and we have been tirelessly working to get more Custom made jewelry into the cases.
Check out this nail ring. Lee bought a nail from the hardware store, shaped it into a ring, made a rubber mold of that, shot a wax, and cast it in silver. It turned out great, so get down here tonight and snatch it (or any of the other awesome rings, bracelets and necklaces we have been making) up before it is gone.
