Custom Designed Jewelry
Since 1977, custom designed jewelry has been our specialty. We take great pride in customizing an old or new piece of jewelry into something that can be worn with pride. With over 45 years of experience, we provide unique designs and personal service to satisfy your needs.
Custom Jewelry Making Process
The hardest part of the jewelry design process is getting the vision from your head, onto paper. We ask our customers to bring with them any inspiration that they’ve seen; be it a screenshot from a website, a tear out from a magazine, even a hand sketched drawing will help us to understand what you’re after. There are a few ways to create a piece of jewelry; fabrication, wax carving, and CAD. Once we’ve determined what we’re making, we will determine which of the three processes will work best and a simple sketch and/or a CAD rendering will be provided along with the cost and time frame for production.
Custom Jewelry Fabrication
- Jewelry Fabrication is done by bench jewelers to assemble separate elements to integrate them into a finished jewelry item. The process often requires a jeweler to intertwine multiple precious metal components by soldering or using a laser machine.
- When carving a wax ring, the carving process begins by sawing off a slice of wax in the right thickness, taking care to make sure the sides are flat and parallel since we’ll be using them to mark and measure. The center is enlarged to correct finger size, and calipers are used to mark the wax accordingly. Finer hand tools are used to refine the final shape. These waxes carving tools come in a variety of shapes to fit into different spaces. They are very sharp and can be used to dig into the surface or to remove tiny shavings of wax. We’ll smooth out the surface of the wax model, round the edges on the band, and chip away at the design until it’s just right, taking care to make sure that the ring looks proportional from all angles. If there are to be stones set into the ring, it is now that the jeweler will create the seats for the stones. Finally the wax model is prepped for casting and finally finished.
- A CAD model, or “Computed-Aided Design”, is a 3d digital model of an object. Although we prefer to hand carve our wax models, 3d models are becoming essential in modern jewelry design. It is basically design that occurs in a program on a computer, where you can create three-dimensional objects in the virtual world. CAD programs allow for a lot of manipulation and almost infinite detail in whatever you are doing, and they are utilized in architecture, industrial manufacturing, product design, and, of course, jewelry!
