31st May 2022 - Customer location: Kalgoorlie, W.A.

The last nine posts to my website have been about rings so I think it is time for something else. A long time customer came to me to have some earrings made to mark an important milestone in his wife’s working career. The above design would be our starting point.

He already had a pair of my clip hoops from which his wife hangs some drops. These new earrings would be made to hang from these as well.

The first thing we looked at with the design was to include the top feature or not. It was decided to go without as shown on the right.

Next we explored the size of the earring in proportion to the clip hoop. For this we also used photos of the earring edited onto the recipients ear. I had those photos on hand from a previous pair of earrings I had made for her to wear on the same clip hoops..

The customer decided to widen the wirework slightly and remove the mill-graining. He also explored making the centre gem feature bigger. As you can tell from the above photo a blue gemstone would be used in the centre.

My customer wanted to open up the gems more so the bezel setting was removed and replaced with very fine claws. The size of the sphere features was increased so that they touched the frame.

Some changes to the planned gem size also had to be made as what was available was not the exact size of the design so far. This meant that the spheres as shown above were reduced in size which I think worked out well as you will see below. Due to Covid there is a lot less to chose from nowadays in a large range of materials especially matching gemstones.

The finished earrings are shown above. You can see that even though made to scale the extra width of the wirework looks a lot softer in metal than during the design process.

It was quite hard to source the matching gems in a size and colour that my customer liked but in the end we found an excellent pair of Ceylon Blue sapphires. Both myself and the customer were thrilled with them.

Have a great week.