Hope you all enjoyed Oscars last night.
As a jeweler I was interested  to see what jewels will shine on red carpet last night.
Here are just a few  looks enhanced with beautiful jewellery:
 https://ca.shine.yahoo.com/photos/2015-oscars-red-carpet-report-card

It’s snowing out….I know, like you didn’t notice. It’s pretty, fluffy, white snow but it’s coming down like it’s going out of style. (We hope!) Snow and sub-zero temperatures mean lots of layers: hat, scarf, mitts, six sweaters and a jacket.
You might be sick of that jacket so I present you with some much prettier ones…for your ears!!!!

Sasha Oda-Acherade

Anita Ko

E F Collection

Lanie Lynn Jewelry

Maria Black

Plukka

Sidney Chung

Sydney Evan

         Today January 23, 2015 is my last day here working at Jewel Envy and the end of my first semester. My experience working here has been a great one and I even had the opportunity to design my own rings. And that is chance not many co-operative students in high school get to do I’ve learned.
         When I was asked if I would like the chance to design my own piece of jewellery I was thrilled to work like real goldsmith and design my own. The first thing to was do my homework on ring designs. Next I carved the design in wax. It took me two tries in wax to get the ring design right.
         Third step was to get it ready for casting. It takes awhile before you can cast and since I have no experience in casting I had to learn first before I could cast my ring. I found it kind of hard because I only had few weeks left so it was rushed and we had to book a day to do the casting. Luckily I had a great supervisor Amanda who helped me out.
         There was a little mix up with casting and my ring was accidentally cast in the wrong metal. So we had to start over but we did not have to do too much we just made a silicon mold from the ring to make new waxes from for the new wax rings. When I started to cast the rings I was excited by how they came out. The next thing to do was emery and the final step was polishing.
        It was a great experience with many memorable moments for me. And to be able to take my own work home was more than I could say thank you for. These last two piece I worked on here at Jewel Envy are the ones I am most proud of for the hard work I did. And I am very happy to have been a part of the amazing work environment at Jewel Envy.

Since tomorrow is February 1st (Geez… time flies!) I’ve decided to share with you my save or splurge gift ideas for Valentine’s Day. I hope this helps!

“Found” collection by Lauren Hanham. I just love the large fan-shaped necklace!

Is this ruby-headed snake ring out of your budget? Get a a piece of Archerade by Sasha Oda with this lovely Toro ring!

Flowers are always a good choice for Valentine’s Day! Here’s a peak at Hyewon Jang‘s dangle earrings.

Carved gemstone flowers and hummingbirds. What a sweet idea by Gillian Batcher of Pash.

Get her roses that will never wilt! Lucky for you these earrings by Amanda Henderson of Jewelust are priced for any budget!

This amazing full deck necklace by Alexis Kostuk of Glaciale is reversible and interchangeable! Not a world champion poker shark? Get your Queen of Hearts this single pendant instead.

This gorgeous heart necklace is made by Chia-Chien Tsai of Ellolite. It is a great price, but if you’re looking for something less extravagant, she makes a single heart necklace too!

With only 2 weeks left to pick up the perfect gift for your sweetie, I hope this helped to make the decision a little easier!

I read an article on Ganoksin about setting fragile stones. They are amazing jewellery pieces with challenging stone setting techniques. Artists are absolutly creative and made the stones come to live! Here is the link to the full article. https://www.ganoksin.com/borisat/nenam/setting-delicat-gemstones.htm

Here at Jewel Envy we all work very hard to make the best jewellery we possibly can. Sometimes it takes a couple hours to come up with a sound idea, sometimes it takes weeks or even longer! Some of us draw, some of us make models, some of us use ourselves as guinea pigs. I’m not very talented in the way of drawing so I tend to make models of my pieces. Another huge part of my design process is testing out the jewellery. I would never want to put something out for sale that would be terribly uncomfortable, didn’t look right or would fall apart so I always wear my designs around for a couple weeks before they get my approval.
For my newest collection “Found” I decided to explore the possibilities of using just one shape.

I’ve designed 7 pieces so far using just this one shape and I’m still creating more. One of the pieces I wanted to create was a big statement necklace. After casting multiples in silver and quickly pulling some extras in wax I started to move the pieces around in different patterns on my bench until I came up with one I liked.

After casting the extra pieces I needed, I soldered them together and got to work on the chain portion of the necklace.

I wanted to use these cool agate beads for my chain but after assembling everything it was obvious they weren’t the right choice for this piece. There was too much competition happening between the beads and the silver and the black in the beads was clashing hard with the blackened silver.

 

I tried a different design with multiple thin chains and wasn’t completely satisfied with how it looked but it was alright for the moment.

It was Christmas vacation time so I decided to leave it as is and wear it over the holidays to test out the strength of the connecting pieces. I wasn’t completely sure they would hold but I wanted the sections to be able to move without a ton of space between them. The small jump rings I chose had  been successful with the other pieces in the collection but…

…the weight of this particular necklace and the lack of wiggle room between the big sections caused the little jump rings to snap off no matter what I tried. Even broadening the space between the sections didn’t work. I didn’t want to use larger rings either because that’s not the look I was going for. So it was back to the drawing bench.

Playing with waxes and using the sections I already had to make the necklace work as one solid piece.

I soldered my new pieces on. The brown stuff is yellow ocher which helps prevent old solder seams from melting while soldering new ones.

I also changed the chain from two sections to one. They kept twisting around each other which I found very annoying and visually unappealing. I’m so very fussy.

Here’s the final piece (for now). I’m giving it a good test run for a couple days before I put the marcasites back in. Hopefully all is good in the world of structural integrity. I’m sure I’ll find out soon enough.
So there’s a little insight into what part of a design process might look like. Hope you enjoyed!

-L