Secrets of Making Jewelry

The art of making jewelry is as old as a human race. People used jewelry to adorn themselves and to show their status. Making jewelry was a way to earn a living and a source of pride and fulfillment for the craftsman who was creating it. As mankind progressed through the ages becoming more technologically advanced, so did the jewelry business achieving its acme at the end of the nineteenth, beginning of the twentieth century. Armed with the tools provided by the industrial revolution, jewelry making became a cutting-edge technology, and masterpieces created by Faberge, Lalique and Cartier have no rivals in terms of their beauty and complexity even now. The profession of a jeweler was respected and well paid; becoming a jeweler required an initial talent and many years of apprenticeship.

However, with the advent of the digital revolution at the end of the twentieth century, the tools became so advanced that, instead of helping the jeweler, they could replace him altogether. That allowed companies to cut costs and maximize profits. Jewelry making procedures that still required the skills of a jeweler were simply discarded, and that gave the jewelry that simplified "BLING" look. Most of the jewelry you can find in jewelry stores today is not made by jewelers but machines and blue-collar workers who operate them; and in the good old USA making jewelry became just another job that Americans are unwilling to do.

Of course, any attempt to reverse this trend would be futile, but luckily the demand for high quality hand crafted jewelry still exists, and many well known jewelry firms can still offer gainful employment to a skilled jeweler.

This site is an attempt to inform the public, jewelers and customers alike, about some of the advanced techniques that were popular only a decade ago but are now going the way of the dodo.

Copyright 2009