Brass wire is an excellent medium for starting to create designs with metal before going on to use the more expensive silver wire. You can experiment with any wire you can find as most are suitable for making jewelry. In any case, it’s good practise and should something turn out particularly well, you can always [...]
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Twisting silver wire provides a number of textures which can be used in many ways to make jewelry and ornaments. The bracelet and rings, shown here, were made from round silver wire, but you may wish to experiment with the many different shapes and sizes of wire available.
Twisting wire
This technique involves twisting two or more [...]
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Polyester resins are thermosetting plastics from which you can make beautiful jewelry in all kinds of intricate shapes. The resin flows into a mould made by a metal strip and glass, sequins, wire, glitter and small beads can be embedded in it. When cured the resin can be finished in a number of different ways [...]
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Casting
There are various techniques for transforming metals into shapes. Casting is one such technique and involves pouring molten metal into a mould or crucible where it is left to harden. This technique was first mastered in Mesopotamia more than 5,000 years ago, when moulds were chiselled from stone or baked clay and filled with molten [...]
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Although many of the materials used for contemporary jewellery-making are new and revolutionary, the art of metalwork often follows the basic rules set out by early craftsmen thousands of years ago. Apart from the advent of electroplating in the 19th century and the more efficient techniques allowed by today’s machines, many of the basic metalworking [...]
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Enamel application
There are two methods for applying enamel to metal — dusting (which is unsuitable for small items of jewellery) and wet-laying. For wet-laying, put a little enamel powder into a clean ceramic dish and mix it with distilled water by degree. Apply the resulting mixture thinly and evenly over small areas of the metal [...]
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Enamel is a form of glass and enamelling is the process of fusing it to metal with heat. The earliest known example of enamelled jewellery is a set of Mycenaean beads which date back to 1450BC. Constructed using the champleve method, they are made from blue enamel fused to decorative gold beads. During the 3rd [...]
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Cut stones can either be partly drilled for mounting or fully drilled and strung onto cord or wire. For soft substances, such as amber and marble, you can use a hand or bench steel drill, while a solid metal drill with diamond grit is recommended for harder substances (this should be used in conjunction with [...]
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Gold is a rare metal, beautiful and unique, and it has ancient associations with royalty and religion. It is also the money metal, a measure of the wealth of nations and a commodity in which to invest in times of crisis. This yellow metal is an element scientifically called Au, from the Latin aurum. It [...]
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There are six similar but quite distinct platinum metals. Besides platinum itself there is ruthenium, osmium, iridium, rhodium (which, as was mentioned in the section on gold, is used to plate white gold), and palladium. Palladium is considerably lighter than platinum and greyer in colour. Despite considerable expenditure in the 1950s in an attempt to [...]
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