How are jewelry made?
Handmade Jewelry Making
Artisanal jewelry is made by hand, using traditional techniques.
First, pure silver is melted with the desired alloy using heat, and poured into the chosen mold, as needed in the form of thread or sheet.
Annealing: It consists of softening the metal through heat; By applying a flame to the silver sheet, its hardness is reduced and it goes from a rigid to malleable state. During the making of the jewel, the metal is heated as many times as necessary (Before carrying out almost all the steps described below).
It is stretched or laminated by pressing the silver thread or sheet, giving it the necessary width, thickness, and length.
The piece is flattened with hammer blows to smooth and shape it.
Jewel Tempering
Tempering is the process of cooling metal by immersing it in cold water. Because hammering and other work processes alter the crystalline structure of silver and gold, making them brittle, the need for tempering has been recognized by metalworkers for thousands of years. It seems like a primitive process, but it takes a certain skill and knowledge of the properties of metals to perform tempering successfully, avoiding the formation of cracks or dark spots.
Inlayed and embossed
Inlaying and hammer embossing are the simplest and most common methods for working silver and gold.
Production of serial jewelry
The first step is to make a sketch on paper, as if it were a haute couture model. Once the creative part is finished, in which the style of the collection is conceived, each of the pieces is drawn by computer in 3D. Already in the workshop, a wax prototype is created that turns the 3D drawings into a real figure.
From the initial wax prototype, rubber or silicone molds are made to obtain a negative impression of the piece.
Lost wax casting is a very old technique, already used in ancient China to cast bronze vessels, and it is still the most used today.
It consists of the following: Molten wax is injected into the rubber molds, which once cold gives rise to a wax reproduction of the original prototype. Several of these reproductions are assembled into strips and placed in a cylinder, which is filled with a paste. The cylinder is then placed in an oven, where the wax evaporates.
Finally, and with the coating hardened, one of the last steps is to place the cylinder in a centrifuge and inject the silver into the mold left by the evaporated wax.
Rings, earrings, and other creations have just been born! Now they are separated, reviewed, and polished to give them a perfect finish.