I’ll always remember my first time at the wheel. I was a short, scrawny, 9 year old girl with straggly, brown hair. I did not know what I was doing.

Zzz… zzz…zzz, went the hard, abrasive wheel, as I gouged deep, rough valleys into the thin, silver, practice ring, that was just cast and cleaned. Trying to take down the casting sprue. Then the ring slipped off the wheel and my finger received the same treatment. Zzz… into my soft, not yet calloused finger tip. I received a little instruction from my teacher, my dad. He showed me how to firmly but gently, roll the ring into the wheel to keep the nice ...

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 ...

Child Labor laws notwithstanding, my dad made us all work in the shop from a very early age. Sometimes it was good fun- learning to melt the wax and playing with tiny Austrian Crystals were things any child would enjoy. Other times it was not so fun, but we survived.

My right ring finger, however, almost didn’t.

The year was 1991. I was thirteen, in my first semester of full homeschooling, and my dad had found a great advantage to his daughters not being away at school for 7 hours a day: he could have us help out in the store nearly full time.

I would come to work with him in the morning, my hair up in a banana comb most days. We would park in back of the little strip mall on Speedway Boulevard in ...

Having apprenticed under a half-crazed master jeweler, I have grown to be closed minded towards new ideas. Wait. Let me rephrase that. I have learned to be closed minded towards any good idea that anyone but myself has come up with. So having said that, let me begin.

Centrifugal casting was THE way and the ONLY way to cast precious metal. It took me some time to learn, but after a year, I believe I had acquired the skill to complete a successful casting. All the while, there was still a small spark in the back of my mind telling me that there were other- possibly more efficient- ways of doing things.

“JASON! Go heat up the car! i want to look at 800 acres not too far from here, where we can build our ...