Unusual Shapes…

This week’s blog features a commissioned ring and a pendant ordered from my online shop, but I’ve grouped them together as they have both feature awkwardly shaped stones.

The “stones” for both were supplied by the client, with the silver coming from my scrap stash. For the ring, the stones are rough cut sapphire and in the pendant, some sentimental sea glass pick up from the beach.

The main process of bezel setting awkwardly shaped stones isn’t really much different to standard geometric ones. I roll down a thin strip of metal and then make this into the same shape as the stone. For a round and oval stones, this is dead easy, as I just make a cone shape. For a square or rectangular stone, there will be some extra filing and soldering involved to get those nice angles. For awkwardly shared settings though, you kind of have to sculpt the strip of metal to allow for all the different depths and ins and outs of the stone (or whatever else you might be setting into metal).

The sapphires were beautiful but were also very thin, so I had to allow for this by creating a slightly thicker seat for them inside their bezels. Sapphires are pretty hard wearing, but can still break, especially when they’re in thin slice form, so pushing the metal over them around the edges was a little scary!

The pieces of sea glass were thicker, but glass is much softer than sapphire and easily scratched by steel setting tools. So scary again for slightly different reasons!

Experience, skill and lots of patience are needed for all stone setting, but especially this type as all of these are their own unique shape, so there’s no breaks allowed as no other stone is going to fit the setting!