June 10th 2013

Often the design we start with is very different to the one we end up with. In the case of this job we started with the intention to make one piece of jewellery and ended up making two.

I was provided with some old jewellery to remake into a new ring. All of the pieces were of great sentimental value and the initial idea was to make a single ring. The story of making the ring I will share with you next time but for today we will look at the pendant which was made from the materials we did not use in the ring.

After the making of the ring we were left with a cushion cut Tanzanite and a sentimentally valuable semi precious red gem. My customer sent me a sketch of a Boab tree pendant design that she had long wanted to make on the chance that a quote might fall into her budget. The quote did fall into her budget and all of the design was finalised from that moment via email between Cairns and Port Douglas.

The first issue I had to address, which I mentioned to my customer in the quote,  was the scale of the pendant. As drawn by the customer the pendant would be a bit under 4cm in diameter. To make the pendant a realistic size I scaled the design back to 3cm in a graphic to show the gems in proportion to a pendant of that size. With the scale of the design approved we set about making the pendant.

First I made a silver draft of the tree shape and emailed a photo of it to the customer. Next I moved onto making the tree and circular frame in gold.  Once I had that made I edited up another graphic showing the pendant with a bail and the gems.

Using the customer gems plus 9ct gold and three diamonds that I supplied the pendant was created and is pictured finished below. 

Next time I post we will look at the designing and making of the ring for this customer.