Transcript
Courtney Gray: Welcome to Creative Side Jewelry Academy of Austin, online at creativeside.org. I’m Courtney Gray. I started my school here, Creative Side Jewelry Academy, four years ago. I’m here in Austin, and I’m going to tell you about jewelry making today.
Today, I’m going to talk to you about some top techniques of the jewelry making trade. There’s so many techniques in this industry. I mean, it is endless. We come up with new classes here every semester because of that fact. I’m going to show you a few of the top techniques that we teach here at Creative Side Jewelry Academy.
One of those is just simply sawing work out and creating beautiful pieces like this. It’s very simple. You just need a couple of tools, some sheet, and you need a saw. And you can actually create beautiful work like this. So, learning how to use the jeweler saw. And then we have riveted pieces here. Also, great ways to use textured work in your jewelry and make beautiful combinations and looks like this. Riveting your work, just creating a cold connection. No torch needed. You do not need a torch to do this kind-of work.
Soldering your work together and putting things together using heat. So we call that, “hot work”—another top technique of the jewelry-making trade. And once you learn how to use that torch, you can actually combine pieces and overlap pieces—we call it “Appliqué”: putting pieces on top of another piece. And then eventually learn bezel setting and ways to put stones onto your work and create beautiful color.
Fold-forming and forging, so your learning how to hammer metal and make it do what you want it to do using simple bends in the metal to create earrings or necklaces, beautiful formed bracelets.
Another top technique I would mention is precious metal clay. So, your actually forming and building these pieces in clay and then when you take that clay and fire it in a kiln, you actually burn off organic binder, and you receive 99.9% fine silver from that burn off. So, your piece ends up turning into metal. It’s like magic.
We teach all these things here at Creative Side Jewelry Academy, and I hope you’ll come and check ’em out, and let us show you how to use these top techniques in your jewelry and create beautiful things.
