Jewelry Manufacturing and Beck

This post was originally scheduled to be written and posted a week ago. Life intervenes. The contents of a post from my personal Facebook page tells the story…
“That moment that you realize you can look up lyrics and live the rest of your life not stewing about what Beck says before the line, “I’m a loser baby, why don’t you kill me.” Because when you have a head cold, you think about pretty weird stuff…”
But I’m no perdedor amigos so here’s a post about making one of my most popular pearl earring designs. Interestingly, as this post goes out on Tuesday, May 19th, I will be attending the Santa Fe Symposium on Jewelry Manufacturing Technology. The world’s premier repository of information regarding jewelry manufacturing. I’m a regular attendee there and have been published by the symposium 5 times so far. I’m sure I’ll contribute again!
For Mother’s day this year Alysia wanted to give her mom a pair of my “Pearl Cup” earrings. They were a big hit and A’s sis, Elizabeth was curious about how I make them. After I explained the process, she said, “Wow, that’s really neat, you should make a blog post about that.” So I’m dedicating this post to Elizabeth, my really cool sister-in-law.
I typically make my own alloys by combining gold with various other metals to form either 14K or 18K gold in several colors, yellow, white and rose.

After melting the metals together I pour the molten alloy into a tall stainless steel container of water to make what we call “shot”. This alloyed shot is then used to cast or form sheet or wire for fabrication.

Sometimes this process produces pretty neat cup shapes, which I will set aside until I get another one that sort of matches in size.
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With a post and back, this becomes a “Pearl Cup” earring! You can order your very own pair by visiting Gary Dawson Jewelry Design.

These naturally produced shapes are never the same, even within an earring pair which makes them unique and personal!