So You Want to Make Jewelry… Part 4

There are many great starting points when beginning to learn jewelry making, and one isn’t “better” than another, but there is a set of skills that are used most often and these skills are where I start all my students. Here is a list:

• Sawing/Piercing

• Filing

• Hammering/Forging

• Polishing/Texturing

• Soldering

• Forming

Sawing is one of the most frequently used skills, and paradoxically, it is easy to learn and hard to master. There are only 3 different saw cuts: straight, curve, and corner. Learning how to make these cuts is the easy part. The hard part is learning to make them with precision, and there are three guiding principles of acquiring precision:  practice, practice, practice. As the image in this post shows, amazing results can be achieved with a jeweler’s saw and a few other tools. 

Making jewelry requires a working knowledge of many skills. They all take time to learn and prIctice, so start by learning the foundational ones and you will be off to a great start. If you would like to learn how to create work like this, use the contact form with the subject “sawing process” and I will respond to you with a step-by-step procedure for doing this kind of jewelry work.