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So basically the jewelry that I make on sterling silver I do it using the lost wax process which I basically you go out and buy yourself a big block of wax usually a lot bigger than this and you cut it up and you carve it these just are examples of me playing around with wax. And you basically you know this is for example very, very simple band with texture that I put on. So you got also the tools, all sorts of tools, all sorts of thing s that you can use to shape your wax.
Now once you get the wax, you can then go to a casting company and that casting metal and then once you and this is what it looks like when it comes back, it’s really dirty, it’s got a sprue on it and that you have to saw off and it doesn’t look finished at all.
So once you get that back you clean it up which is they say you saw off the sprue and then got to file it and then you got to go on with sandpaper four different grades of sandpaper, starting with course to very, very fine that you can get in there and really polish your up your piece. Then once get a finish piece you then go make a mold. For example this is my mold of the love. Most of the molds some are made up of silicon but most of them are made out of rubber. This is an example of a rubber mold and this is the little entrance where the wax gets injected. So once you have mold you can reproduce a piece as many chance as you like and the process is you inject the wax, so the wax takes the shape of whatever it is and the negative space here which is to say in this case the love. And then you can get the wax cast in to metal with a very intricate process. And then you get back the piece dirty and then you got a file it and then once you filed your piece you move over to the polishing machine.
Now you got different kinds of wheels. And if you got different kinds of compounds, some of them are rougher, some of them are smoother depending if you want to high polish. So basically the polishing machine, you just take in your piece of jewelry and you just basically put it on the wheel and it gets really, really beautiful shine.
So that’s basically the process, it is pretty time consuming. One other thing I can show you is soldering torch. Now when you want to join two pieces of metal together you use the soldering torch with gas and oxygen and with the heat and with solder you can actually you know melt two pieces together. I’ll show you an example of something that I recently soldered. This is a sterling sliver bangle, it looks a little rough because it has not been polish but basically when you want to sent a stone which lets say I want to set this little amethyst bullet you have to got a bezzle. A bezzle is what encircles the stone, so I soldered the bezzle on to the bangle. And now I am going to set it which is the same as take the hammer and just lightly tap all around so that way the stone is perfectly set and is not going to move. But as you can see setting stone is a hard work. These people who sets stones all day long and set diamonds and bronze. So it’s really something special. This love ring takes about an hour and 45 minutes to do because you got to get the love cast and then you also get the double ring cast, then you got to solder the two pieces together and then you have to polish it. So it’s actually quite a bit of work so let’s say it takes about an hour and 45 minutes. By bigger pieces take you know anything you know 10, 15 hours. But on the whole the pieces of sterling silver that I make take about two hours each so its a little time consuming because they are all hand made and because I’m in charge of my own production.
So that’s the labor of love.
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