Four Days to Set the Diamonds

White Thunder took about three weeks. Four of those days were nothing but setting the diamonds.

People see a finished brooch and read the price. They cannot see where three weeks went. So here is the whole thing, photographed as it happened.

Five pearls, chosen in an order

It starts on a tray. Not with a drawing.

These five had to work as a sequence, which is harder than choosing five good pearls. Each one had to pass its shape to the next, so the eye moves down the brooch instead of stopping on any single stone.

The yellow line is drawn straight over the photograph. That is the gold, before it exists. Everything after this is an attempt to build that line in metal without losing what the pearls were already doing.

To hold them while I work I stand them in white plasticine first, and move them until the arrangement is right. Only then does the wax start.

The wax

Blue wax, because it holds to the surface of a pearl properly. I have written elsewhere about why I work in wax at all and how I build it up in layers rather than carving down from a block.

What matters here is that the wax was carved against these five pearls and no others. Not a setting that pearls were then found for.

Why white gold

The colour of the metal follows the pearls. These are silvery white, and yellow gold would have argued with them. White gold sits with them.

That decision costs something. In yellow gold I get depth from texture, a matte surface against a polished one, and that contrast does the work. White gold is rhodium plated at the end, and rhodium fills fine texture and flattens it out. So the texture cannot carry the piece.

Which is exactly why this brooch has diamonds. They are not decoration added on top. They replace the texture. They are what makes it three dimensional.

Deciding where the stones go

Look at that photograph again. The gold is smooth and completely bare. Nothing has been drilled yet.

That comes next, and it is days of work on its own: deciding where every stone sits, drilling each hole, and choosing what size goes into each one. The stones are not uniform. They follow the curve, and they change size as the form narrows.

The red is setting compound. It is heated until soft, the gold is pressed into it, and it sets hard around the piece so nothing moves under the setter's tool. Without it the work is impossible.

Four days

2.52 carats, in stones of roughly a point each. That is a great many diamonds, each one seated by hand into a hole drilled for it specifically.

Four days. And the surface underneath had to be planned weeks earlier, thick enough for the setter to cut into without collapsing, and still light enough to wear on a jacket.

The small gold pins standing up out of the metal are what the pearls sit on. Each pearl is drilled and goes onto its pin with a dedicated adhesive. They go on at the very end, after the rhodium, because a pearl cannot go anywhere near the plating bath.

Three weeks

Five pearls that will not be found again in that order.

White Thunder has sold. Something like it can be made, but not the same one, and I would tell you that before you ordered.

If you want something made this way, start here.