The customer wants what the customer wants...

Whenever you make a piece of handcrafted jewellery, you'll not always get it right!

Currently Amber is one of my best selling healing crystal jewellery, and I had this little beauty on my stall at the Bishton Hall Easter Craft Fair:
 

A customer approached teh stall, drawn to this piece of gorgeousness, but unfortunately it was not a Cinderella moment, as the ring was slightly too small, the band was too wide, she wasn't keen on the border setting of the Amber and the amber was too long!!!

Knowing that I was going to be returning to Bishton Hall the following weekend, for The Sustainability & Vegan Festival I offered to make her a bespoke ring, at no extra cost, with her specific design.

Fingers measured, and I was left to create her perfect Oval Amber ring.

Now when I am creating, especially for face-to-face events I tend to set aside 2 days of making, as I tend to make in batches, and I knew that I did not just want to make one Amber ring, especially as I knew that I had a bag of 3 different types of Baltic Amber.

The other thing is that one I do not like to create the same thing over and over again, so I needed a way of remembering which setting went with which colour of Amber.

The first part of the process with bezel setting is to create the setting for the healing crystal, at this point it is so easy get your settings mixed up even when you're doung them one at a time.

To get around this issue I create 3 distinct setting for each baltic amber cabochon on my jewellers bench:
   
As the customer was very specific to her ring design, I would know which one was hers, so it was just the matter of the other two rings.

Both The Cherry and Ombre Baltic Amber cabochons were stunning and I wanted to make settings that would not detract from their natural beauty.

These cabochon are smaller than the orginal marquise Amber ring, so the ring shank would have to be smaller to balance out the design, but I was still able to added a stamped design to the commission ring, nd textures to the other two rings, before creating the final ring settings:
 
After making the necessary adjustments to the bezel setting walls, taking the contures of the stone into consideration, although in the case of the commissioned ring it was a little higher than I wanted, but when i was checking the hieghts, the cabochon got stuck, and I couldn't get it out of the setting, without damaging the setting and/or the stone, so I just went with it:
   
I wanted to do someting quirky and a bit avant garde with the Cherry Amber cabochon, so I set the stone off-centre and added some hole detail for the setting to lighten it up:
   
The third of the Baltic amber rings I created was this fabulous Ombre amber, and I wanted the colour graduation to really pop, so gave it a simple border:
   

The customer loved her ring, which she said was a perfect fit!!!

I love how all these handcrafted sterling silver amber rings turned out, I think they are both versatile and contemporary, sterling silver is such a gorgeous neutral metal that not only does not detract the natural beauty of the crystal beads, but actually amplifies the crystals energies and healing properties so what do you think?

I do have a favourite, but I would really love to hear your thoughts, so post something in the comments below.

Until next time

Joolz xxx

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April 23, 2022

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