I had the greatest pleasure recently to make a really interesting handmade piece of bespoke jewellery for a very special person. It was particularly fun as it was one of those ‘make it as crazy and impossible as you like’ briefs that gives you total permission to interpret the job any way you want.
I will take you on a whistle stop tour of the process:
Stage One - Have a Good Old Chat
Face to face is always best when starting a new bespoke project, but some of these chats will take place on messenger or Whats App as well.
Basically, I want to find out what my customer wants the jewellery to do. What is the function that the piece will perform? What role will it fill? Is it something that will be worn every day? Is it something for work? Is it a showy statement piece or more of a creature comfort?. Is it to mark a stage in life, celebrate a recent feeling or be a symbol of support, strength or leadership.
People want jewellery for lots of different reasons and it’s my job to understand what each piece is required to do.
Also I want to understand what kinds of styles of jewellery the person likes and already has, so I can see where the Meadowhawk Jewellery piece is going to fit in. What clothes does the person like? If it is a bead project, then colour will also play quite an important role.
Stage Two - Research
Then I make a few notes about the key parts of the brief and note down important things like ring size and whether my person likes a tightly fitted item or something with a bit more wiggle room. (This is pretty important where rings are concerned I have found...)
In the case of this particular ring (among other things,) I wrote down the following:
I then set about looking around for inspiration. Here’s my little mood board of collected pictures from all over the place:
Sometimes I take the camera on an image-hunt outing too at this stage to take some snaps for ideas and I set about rummaging around in my silver stores in the workshop to identify the types of shapes that I might like to use would to make the design. I also did a set of sketches of potential ‘looks’ for this ring. (I don’t draw well so excuse the scrappy pencil sketch.) The idea below was the one I liked the best:
Stage Three - Make
Yes it looks impossible, but that’s what a quite liked about it. It had an element of ‘chunk’ to it too, but also the fine piece linking the larger pieces gave it some ‘delicacy’ and light and shade which I found appealing. I set aside an entire day to saw snip and cut my pieces and start assembling and soldering the ring.
Late on in the day I decided to remove the second ‘floating wire’ feature and reposition where the wire went completely as I didn’t think it added anything and actually made the ring look more ‘twee’, and this ring wasn’t going to look twee! I also altered where the different texture effects were to be placed quite a few times before I got to something I was happy with!
At each stage I checked that the sizing was on target too, as adding texture to the silver also adds millimetres to the silver. (imagine rolling out a piece of pastry with a rolling pin or squishing in a pattern, where the pastry has been squeezed it splays and grows in size...)
Once it was soldered, sized and polished, the ring was treated to oxdise the silver and then re-polished by hand to bring out the highlights.
The finished bespoke sterling silver ring is pictured below. I’m so pleased with how it turned out, even though it didn’t end up looking much like the original sketch at all:
If you liked this post you may also like the post about how I create my sterling silver warrior rings.
Thank you for joining me here on the Meadowhawk Jewellery blog! x