Earrings for Gene

I wanted a pair of earrings for Gene (Ava, too, but that’ll have to wait), but here’s the challenge. Many, many stones are enhanced, and I believe London blue topaz is. In fact, buying stones is a lot like buying yarn; if you don’t buy the same dye lot for yarn, then your project will be multi-colored. I knew I could look for a long time before I’d find London blue topaz in the exact same color and shade as the one in Gene, and I didn’t want to wait or spend the time looking. So, I figured I’d find the right mix of coloring materials for epoxy resin and make a pair of earrings with an inlay rather than a stone in the design.

In addition, Gene is rather busy, and accompanying earrings, in my opinion, needed to be simpler in design and shorter so as not to compete with the necklace. The design came to me; I sketched it out and began work. The photo below shows the original sketch and the sterling components making up the design.

Some earrings are the same design for both, but these earrings would be mirror images. I like to do this especially for stud earrings, and for these earrings in particular. The below picture shows the work in process for the earrings but also shows the mirror imaging.

After completing the fabrication and soldering on the posts, the earrings were cleaned up, and then tumbled in a tumbler, the kind that rock enthusiasts use to polish small stones. The difference is in the media that jewelers use, in this case, stainless steel “shot” (see this picture: https://www.riogrande.com/product/stainless-steel-shot-mixed/339097gp). The purposes for tumbling are: work hardening of the pieces; and burnishing the metal. It’s important that jewelry have enough stiffness that the components won’t move at all, not even when you get a sweater caught in your jewelry. So work hardening will cause the metal to stiffen up. And burnishing, in my opinion, is a lovely finish and precludes polishing. The only catch: the jewelry must be sanded to a finish using finer and finer grit sandpaper. I typically go to 600, and at times, 1500 grit paper (the higher the number, the finer the grit).

After the burnishing, the earrings are ready to be filled with dyed epoxy resin, I will not share the materials I use to color the epoxy — that’s part of my secret sauce. Below is a picture of the earrings as completed. Thanks for reading.