Part I of this series here.

Part II of this series here.

For more photos of this process, visit our flickr photostream!

Quick review- here’s what we started with:

And here’s what we’re going for:

How we get from point A to point B has been detailed fo ...

Remember this?

Part I of this series can be found here.

Part III of this series can be found here.

The molds that we left in the steam de-waxer have lost more than 90% of their wax. They are now ready to enter the next phase of casting! Here is the de-waxing machine:

Not very impressive by itself. Here is the inside, after a de-waxing. Note t ...

“Just make me something pretty.”

The elderly lady was one of my spunkiest customers to date. Her eyes sparkled with dry wit, and her touch on my hand was kindly.

“What kind of pretty?” I asked, laughing, “Swirly pretty? Floral pretty?”

She shrugged and grinned at me,

“You’ll do fine. I know I’ll love it.”

Rarely do clients put their complete faith in my design capability. Most people have an idea, a thought or a stone for a basis, or at least a size reference. I appreciated her confidence in me, but felt completely at sea at to where to start.

A f ...

It was winter and the snow fell thick and silent around the store. We were up to our ears in custom work, but never too busy to turn away one more.

A woman came to us with a pile of scrap gold and a sapphire. She wanted a ring made for her daughter, a nurse here in Cadillac. Because of the physical demands of nursing, a high setting or multiple prongs can be very obstructive and even dangerous to patients. Our challenge was to build it securely, while making sure that there was nothing to catch, snag, scratch, or tear. The ring also had to be built heavy to withstand daily wear and tear.

We melted down her gold, added fresh, and set the ...

What does one do, exactly, when one has multiple stones to put into a design? When you have sapphires, diamonds, and an errant garnet? What about when you have several stones larger than the rest?

Well, if you’re obsessive compulsive about math, your brain sorts the stones out into a pattern. If the number of stones happens to be easily divisible by four, you have a square just begging to be carved!

The garnet that belonged to the customer wound up being too abraded to use, so we found a lovely cropped-corner square to fit in the center, and this entire necklace just came together with ease and grace.

Pardon us if we̵ ...

2007-2008 has been a time of change for Wexford Jewelers. Not only have we completely revamped our landscaping, we just painted our building! We’ve stared at mottled orange & brown brick for so long, the soft gray structure sitting at the corner of Mitchell & River Streets is almost unrecognizable!

Add to that new paint inside, new concrete sidewalks (at least on two sides of the building), a new design studio inside, a new and huge repair/finishing shop, this new and awesome website, and this place seems suddenly like a lovely chrysalis, a shining butterfly emerging from a dusty cocoon.

I will post photos later of the new paint job/garden/sidewalk. The painters are not quite done as o ...

Whether it was the advent of spring, the task of cleaning my outdated wardrobe, or just a lifelong fixation with the color green, I had to build this ring this past month.

Having recently acquired a couple of cat’s eye chrysoberyls, I was anxious to use them in some stunning piece. I think we pulled it off, don’t you?

I began with a simple bezel of extruded blue wax. This is a softer wax, perfect for forming. Bending the wax to within a millimeter tolerance of the stone, I secured it on the bottom with a more rigid piece of Ruby Red wax, extendin ...

Gold at nearly a thousand US dollars an ounce. Platinum over two thousand. Silver, incredibly enough, at twenty dollars an ounce.

Did we honestly think we would see these prices this early on?

The falling value of the dollar coupled with instability in the markets has set this industry on its ear. Then we add low mine production to the mixture, and suddenly a reachable commodity becomes just one more thing that’s harder for the common man to acquire. We’ve had a spike like this before, but not with such a steady upward trend. Is it going to stay this way? Who knows. I, for one, think it will.

Rather than bemoan the price- which I can do nothing about- I want to address the situation ...