B Golden Jewelry School
View from my hotel in Austin, TX
This past Friday, I attended a Flush Setting Course at the B Golden Jewelry School in Austin, Texas. The course was amazing, and our instructor, Donnie Jarvis, was a fantastic instructor!
This was a one-day course designed to work on just one-skill. Flush setting is a skill I’ve done on several designs in the past, but not without a lot of difficulty. My goal for the course was to learn how to properly do the setting, but to also learn where I was making critical mistakes! I learned all of that and so much more!!!
Our tool kit
We were given a kit of 10 2.5mm cubic zirconia stones to set into a copper plate and then later, a brass ring as practice.
Along with lots of information on the mechanics of flush setting and why we take the steps we take to insure a proper stone fit. So much care needs to be taken in properly measuring not only your stones, but also your burs to ensure everything matches up. So many of my past mistakes have come from not having the proper size bur for the stone…along with also not getting my hole the correct size.
Our first step was to measure the stones. Both the height and width. it’s important to measure the height of the stone, so you are sure you have enough metal for the stone, and measuring the width, helps you know what the maximum sized hole you need to drill for the setting.
Once you have your stones measured, you need to drill a pilot hole. This hole allows the point of the faceted stone to have a place to sit. Next, you use incremental sizes of burs, to drill the hole out larger and larger until you get to just under the size of your stone.
It’s important to continually check your stone with the size of the hole, and this takes much longer than you would think! A hole that is too big, will allow the stone to wobble when you go to set. A hole that is too small, will not allow enough metal to be there to secure the stone in place.
As I wanted to really learn the technique, I practiced with half of my stones, and came up with this beautiful piece below. I think I may frame this one and hang it up in the shop! What do you think?
The course was so much fun, with so much knowledge shared! It was great to have a day filled with conversation from other metalsmiths, and to see everyone’s progress and work! I loved it! I am looking forward to really practicing this setting some more, and really perfecting the skill.
Sapphires for September
Sapphires are one of my favorite stones, and they are the birth stone for the month of September One of the most amazing things about sapphires is the range of colors they can be found in! Anything from colorless to blue to pink and even yellow and green!
Sapphires are ideal for jewelry because they are very hard and durable as a gemstone. Second only in hardness to diamonds, sapphires can be set in just about any type of setting without worry, however, it’s important to know, especially for cleaning purposes, if your sapphire has been exposed to any treatments, like heat.
It’s interesting to know, that clear sapphires are occasionally cut as microscopic lens, mainly because they are very hard and highly refractive. Gem-quality colorless sapphires are not common though. Rough colorless sapphires are usually light brown or grey when mined, and then heated to make them clear.
The most desirable blue sapphires are those with the cornflower blue color, which is commonly referred to as “Kashmir blue”. The word sapphire comes from the Latin word, sapphirus, meaning blue.
Sapphires belong to the category of gemstones called Corundum. Corundum gemstones all contain the crystalized composition aluminum oxide. What color a sapphire becomes depends on what other minerals color the stone during the development process. Red stones are typically colored with chromium, blue stones, typically colored with iron and titanium, and yellow sapphires get their color from iron.
The value of a sapphire depends on how rich the color of the natural stone is, along with it’s transparency. The most valuable stones have the best transparency and the richest natural color.
The most common treatments for sapphires is heat-treatments to enhance or change their color. Sometimes radiation is used to enhance a stone’s color, although this process is not very stable to light and another treatment called beryllium diffusion is also sometimes used.
In the United States, Montana is the largest producer of natural sapphires called “Montana” sapphires. These are typically small sapphires, and they come in a range of colors, but are primarily found in blue and yellow.
Chrissi