Seductress - New Pearl Earrings set in Sterling

I am going to release several items of my new spring collection over the next week or so. Here is my first new work. The image is still a work in progress.


Pearl Earrings in a hand made sterling setting. Here is the Etsy listing.

The U shaped motif of the setting on these pearl earrings were designed with my three pearl in a pod ring in mind.


These are bright white fresh water pearls, hand made earring wires, finished in what I call my dark tribal finish. Lots of attention to detail here. The ear wires are rounded on the ends, the edges of the ear wires are high gloss to help catch light. The ear wires are work hardened to help preserve shape.

Dark tribal finish is a modern finish only really available to us in the last few of years. The results are often very difficult to capture in photography. The surfaces are first oxidized, and then are all micro scratched in an aligned direction similar to a CD or a DVD, and similar results. The result on sterling is that the surfaces positively glow in low light conditions as the light is captured in the and reflected in the micro scratches.

These earrings look absolutely stunning in low light conditions. Stunning.


Height 1.25" (3.25 cm)






















I also decided that I would do a multi part blog post on the lost wax casting method. Here is a sprue tree of wax that is going to be cast into silver soon.

This sprue tree will be put into a flask and the flask will be filled with a plaster like substance called investment. Lots of work gets done along the way to help produce clean castings (surfactant wash, debubbling investment, deseaming wax). Once the wax has been encased in the investment, the flask is allowed to dry for a few hours.

Then, the flask with the wax encased is put into a high temperature oven. For me, and everyone does this a bit different, I burn out the wax over about 12 hour time frame. The first stage of burn out is to drive off all the excess water. The next stage melts out almost all the wax leaving a negative space, hence the name lost wax The next stage is a slow ramp up to 1350. This turns what little stuff is left over from the organic material of the positive copy into gas and clears out any and all left over wax.

The flask is then ready for casting. I use a vacuumed method for casting, many other folks use a centrifugal method. I could not tell you which is better because I learned on vacuum. The flask is placed into a special vacuum chamber and the molten metal is poured into the negative space.

The result is a silver copy of the sprue tree you see above. Then the fun begins :) Actualy the whole thing is extremly fun. For those of you that have tried home black and white dark rooms, the experience is like watching your image show up in the developer, but a whole lot longer and a whole lot more exciting.