Author: Jewel Envy

Boris Kolodny, our teacher

Rock quartz – what our gems looked like before we started

The set-up: my smokey quartz is there in the hand piece.

pre-polish lap – made with 20 carats of diaminds.

Yay! gem cutting!!

I jumped on board for the chance to take the gem cutting class that we have running this weekend at Jewel Envy.  I guess I have a romanticized vision of how cutting a gem stone would be like… selecting my gem from a lump of rock and imagining the precious cut gem within like Michelangelo would envision his sculptures trapped within the marble before he began carving.  Like anything you want to accomplish as a goldsmith it is fraught with nitty gritty details.  To speed up the process our teacher, Boris brought us students our chosen gem with a smooth cut gem that we would be adding facets.  To accomplish this we would be using a specialized hand tool that has precise degrees like a compass to tilt the stone at a certain angle and to rotate the gem by exact increments.  Using different grit “laps” we carefully grind each facet onto the surface.  All this is easier than described since there is such a tiny margin for error.  If you make one facet a bit too large than it will effect the entire cut of the piece (which is what I ended up doing and with the help of Boris correcting).  It also took me quite a while to get a good polish on my bottom facets, but after today I have completed 32 facets, woohoo!  I decided to leave the girdle of my gem unpolished.  As Boris let me know, the industry standard was to leave it unpolished only until about ten years ago.  I will post more pics and the final gem when I finish it tomorrow.

-Alexis 

Lately I have been following the price of metals so much so that I have been having dreams about charts on kitco. As both gold and silver has been rising and falling I have been trying to plot my metal shopping days in accordance with the valleys. Sometimes successfully, others not so much.

As I love both of these metals I have no intention of making work without them. So to keep some of the costs down I have started to play around with gold plating instead of solid gold sections. I have been 24K gold plating sections of my Twig line and woven pieces to give the appearance of gold dripping down them. This has been quite successful and I look forward to unveiling the new designs at the One of a Kind this winter! Pictures to follow!

Gillian

With the cost of metal (especially precious metal) continuing to rise, I often find myself thinking about less expensive alternative materials. Acrylic is an interesting material I’ve always wanted to work with. Here’s some inspiration from UK jewellery duo Tatty Devine. While this piece is indeed £270.00, a piece on the same scale in silver would be in the thousands of dollars range! Not something most of us can afford.
-L

https://tattydevine.com

This weekend is the Queen West Art Crawl–an amazing collection of 250 artists in a variety of visual disciplines. The range and quality of the work is impressive. I coveted, amongst other things, two large drawings of cows on mylar. Cows always make me happy.

Of course my main reason for venturing out was to see my incredibly talented friends and studio mates.

Katie Pitt of Kathryn Rebecca

Alexis Kostuk of Glaciale

Lauren Hanham of Lauren Hanham Jewellery Designs

So to does our motivation at Jewel Envy!


It’s been an amazing summer in the studio, we were lucky to have two fabulous interns to help us with our work (many thanks to Heba and Teresa – we miss you both already!).  


After FINALLY accepting that summer is over and fall has officially arrived I have been working away in preparation for the Queen West Outdoor Art Show & Sale.   The show is part of the exciting Queen West Art Crawl weekend.  


I have been putting the finishing touches on my latest collection “Autumn Notes” to showcase for the first time. As well,  Lauren and Alexis have been busy creating beautiful pieces as they will be a part of the show as well.  


Here are the details if you would like to stop by.  

Saturday, Sept 17th – Sunday, Sept 18th

I am participating in an exhibition, The Value of Metal, co-hosted by Ontario Crafts Council (OCC) and Metal Arts Guild Of Canada (MAGC). My jewellery will be showing at the Guild Shop from September 15th to October 16th. They are fun and beautiful. Please come visit!

118 Cumberland St. (Yorkville)
Toronto, Ontario
M5R 1A6
Canada

I have been working on ginkgo leaves and making molds for them. I glued each leaf on a piece of wax sheet in order to increase their thickness so they are easy to cast. Before pouring the paste without shifting them, I glued those leaves on the bottom of the box. Wait for a day for the mold to dry and it’s ready to go!

ChiaChien Tsai

Random detritus, including mokume and a piece of deer antler

Container of containers

pile ‘o boxes

Lately whenever I pause from doing work I gaze around my bench area & frown at the mess that is piling up around me.  I know I have enough storage space for placing my tools and materials away.  However, it seems like when I start working and switch between projects the detritus of “partially finished’, “just started” and “I should fix this” piles become sequestered in small containers and plastic bags crammed between tools.  Also, piles of random tools that I don’t use everyday but need to keep around and easily at hand – such as popsicle sticks and small containers to cram things into.  In an attempt to bolster myself into maintaining a cleaner space I constantly decide that I just need the “right” containers to help organize.  Enter: the dollarama, where cheap plastic containers line the shelves in abundance. I think I might be heading in the right direction with these beauties…

Look upon my organization skills with envy!

So beautiful!

Alexis

Hi Everyone,

It has been quite the busy summer and a project I have been working on since December is 2010 is finally coming to fruition! It all started with an off the cuff question from a client inquiring if I had ever made a Mezuzah. (A Mezuzah is small cylindical sculpture placed on the door of Jewish homes that holds a parchament paper with a sacred prayer). At the time I had not made one but as I like a challenge I said I would be happy to.

This conversation led to me being asked to design a Mezuzah for the Kehilla Residential Program for a new project.  (Kehilla creates affordable housing for low income Jewish families.) So now it was design time. I did many sketches and had many meetings about the design and what I could produce multiples of in a reasonable time frame. We finally agreed on design and then the funding challenge began. As Kehilla is a non-profit they are always in need of more funding! The team went straight to work and after talking up the project they were able to secure the finances to proceed.

I am now in the process of making 100 Mezuzahs for the fall fundraiser! The image on the left is of the final design. It features the Hebrew letter “shin” and is made from stainless steel and copper. They will be available for purchase through Kehilla in time for Sukkot!

Looking forward to updating you on future projects!

Gillian

Hello Hello,

Let me introduce myself, my name is Heba and I am one of two interns currently working at Jewel Envy over the summer. Both Theresa and I attend OCADU for jewellery and metalsmithing, however I am going into my fourth year while Theresa (the other glorious intern) is heading into her final thesis year (as a 5th year student).

I am really enjoying interning here at Jewel Envy (and I am not just saying that). Everyone is very hard working, hilarious and collectively they create a very enjoyable and productive working environment. It’s nice coming in to work on my own collections as well, as the studio is fully equipped and everyone is ready and able to answer any questions. I find that working as a jeweller at home fun at times because I can play my obnoxious music as loud as I want, late into the evening without bothering anyone (who wasn’t grown use to it), and I can work in my pajama’s and bumble bee slippers in comfort. The downside being that I don’t have anyone to bounce ideas off of when things have gone wrong or don’t look just right, this I find to be such a helpful part of the creative process, and one that I cherish at Jewel Envy as everyone here has years of experience. Sometimes I will ask standard questions just to see how someone else does it, because everyone has their own little method to accomplishing a task..some work better than others.

I would definitely recommend interning here to anyone who is deserving and hard working…there is no sitting around looking pretty here.

Well, hope you’re all having a super productive summer like the rest of us here at the studio.

Cheers,

Heba