A Necklace for the Teacher Who Started It All

Some commissions are just commissions. This one was different.

Years ago, when I was still at school, my tutor arranged something rather special for my work experience week. She organised for me to spend the week at a well known jewellers in Bath, and because her husband was driving into the city each day and had the connection to the workshop, I stayed with them for the week so he could take me in.

Can you imagine a teacher inviting a pupil to stay at their house today, just so a work placement could go ahead? It simply wouldn't happen now. But it happened for me, and it changed the whole course of my life.

That week I learnt to saw pierce, hammer, solder and polish. All the fundamental techniques I still use every single day, nearly three decades later. I made a ring, a pendant and a floral pierced piece, and I remember spending an entire day just practising saw piercing lines, Straight lines, zigzags, wavy lines, over and over. It was old fashioned training, the kind you rarely see now.

By the end of my week, my Christmas list was full of jeweller's tools, so I could keep practising what I'd learnt. I never really stopped after that.

I've always known how lucky I was to have that week, and how much my tutor went out of her way to make it happen. So when she emailed me a couple of months ago and asked if I could make her a necklace, there was no question. I jumped at the chance to say thank you.

The necklace

The pendant is built from three soldered layers.

The base layer is large, with a planished finish, so the surface catches the light in small, hammered facets. Onto that, I soldered a second layer made up of circles. And on top of those, the final layer: tiny saw pierced blossom flowers on branches, soldered onto the circles beneath. Once everything was in place, I textured the branches to give them a barky, natural quality, then engraved the petals of each flower by hand.

Thirteen solderings in total went into this piece. Thirteen times heating metal to the exact point where it will flow and join. On one of those solderings, I had a little explosion from a trapped air pocket, something I'd genuinely never come across before in all my years at the bench. It gave me a fright, but the piece survived, and if anything I think that moment sums up what handmaking something really involves. Nothing about it is entirely predictable, however many years you've been doing it.

I've made a short video showing the process from that first planished layer through to the finished pendant, if you'd like to see how it all came together.

Twenty eight years of making jewellery, and I can trace a good deal of it back to one work experience week in Bath, and one tutor who went out of her way for a pupil. This necklace was my way of saying thank you.