What Happened

My mother-in-law’s most important jewelry status statement was her 1 ct diamond ring. The stone was mounted in a fairly standard 1950’s white gold prong setting. I was pleased to inherit this ring.



Several years later two of the prongs began snagging my clothes. The lateral photo shows noticeable air between the prong and the girdle of the diamond. After 60 years of use it was time to reset the stone.



It is my stuff so I saw off two of the triangular shaped prongs to dismount the diamond. Then I start to check out the stone: Cut – old style with truncated culet; color – a little yellow, probably G; purity – clean, vvs; weight – 75 pts. Holy Cow! It is not a 1 ct diamond. What happened to the missing 25 points?

In 60 years many things could have happened to this ring including that, maybe, the diamond had never been a full carat. Certainly I was disappointed not to have a 1 ct diamond but this had been a gift and much appreciated. The situation would have been very different if this had been a client’s ring.

Part of my job is to take in used jewelry for repairs, remodeling or remounting. Sometimes the work is carried out leaving the stone in place. Sometimes the stone needs to be removed from its mount and reset. There is a lot of trust from all parties involved.

In the end what happened is that I remounted the diamond, my diamond, just like I wanted it. Compression formed 18K yellow gold band and 18K white gold filed mount.



Everyone that sees the ring thinks that the diamond is enormous. I think that it is probably a bi-color – G and F. Kept clean, it seems to be a drop of sparkling water.

Counter Blog to Jamie Hall’s Cuttlefish Casting Blog

Cuttlefish bone casting is a form of gravity casting and was used thousands of years ago by the Chinese and the Greeks, among other peoples. Logically the method was developed in geographical areas that were near the sea or ocean and therefore had access to cuttlefish bone. Landlocked areas used clay, sand or tuff stone for gravity casting. Gravity casting is still widely used throughout the world today.

I studied with Maestro Baiocco who had worked for Bulgari making signet rings. Bulgari used lead and indio models with no undercuts to impress the design into the cuttlefish bone. Maestro Baiocco produced one signet ring from scratch every day. Actually he produced it in 4 hours, went off to the horse races and came back to the lab shortly before closing time to give the ring it’s final polish. The procedure is: make the mold, cast, file inside of ring smooth, place on steel ring mandrel and use steel hammer to compact the metal, file inside to final ring size, file outside to desired shape, hollow out the form and finish. This technique can be instant gratification and is useful for producing that one missing part for an object that is in consignment today.

The Maestro’s tips: 1. Place a thin curved strip of zinc across the sprue opening. The hot metal will instantly melt the zinc and the flow will be quicker and smoother. 2. Never cast on a cloudy day. The additional atmospheric moisture causes more vapor release and therefore more porosity in the metal.

I do agree with Mr. Hall when he says that “it can be a very temperamental material to work in”. It is difficult to get repeatable results. And the weight of the casting is up to the gods. But seeing as how the cuttlefish bone texture remains quite popular as a surface texture I, and many others, cheat a bit to get controllable results.


Very simply one does a few carefully prepared castings of desired shapes and then makes a rubber mould of them.


These wax pieces have the cuttlefish bone pattern on both sides and can be used for bracelets, necklaces and earrings. The long, narrow, half round wax wire I generally use as the central part of weddings bands with smooth lateral borders. I have used these elements, on client’s request, to make many jewelry items.


This custom order is just hot off of my work bench and you can see more photos here (link). The client specifically asked that the bracelet base have the cuttlefish bone texture. The bracelet is 7 1/2 in (19 cm) long, 1 in (2.5 cm) wide and weighs 77 grams. My estimate as to how much gold would be required to make the bracelet was 71 grams and was calculated using 1 mm as the average thickness. This meant that the textured base needed to be 0.8 mm thick or less. Also the inside of the bracelet was to be smooth.


Here is how to do it. File and sand flat 2 or 3 cuttlefish bones. With a soft brush eliminate the powder from the bones veining. Dust talcum powder onto both sides of a 1 mm sheet of pliable wax and place the wax on the cuttlefish bone.


Using disposable thin latex gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, press the wax into the cuttlefish bone design. Press firmly and in small areas to get a good impression on the wax. Gently remove wax sheet from bone and cut out the shapes and sizes needed.

So I always have cuttlefish bone in my lab, whether it be for a quick cast or to rob nature’s design.

Through a Glass, Darkly...

In taking photos of my jewelry I have generally used a setup where the object is placed on non-reflective glass elevated above a gradient background. All of the photos on my web site were done in this way, which gave the site a homogeneous look and a “serious” gallery exposition for the jewelry. For Etsy I wanted more casual and more light-hearted photos and when I think of light I think white. I would like for at least some of the background to be white.

To do this trial I used a foldformed pure gold and fine silver pendant. The pendant was photographed on the following backgrounds and in this sequence:
+ on non-reflective glass elevated above a white background.
+ on non-reflective glass placed on a white background.
+ object placed directly on the white background.
All other possible variables such as lighting, exposure time, white balance preset, etc. were kept constant. As one can see from the photos below, placing a support of glass under the jewelry will darken the background.





Above are the results after importing the original photo into PhotoShop and doing some corrections. I want a white background. So I chose a background point on each photo and using the curves tool, arbitrarily brought the R, G and B channels up to a 245 value (255 being white). Using curves the shadows were set at a value of 65.

The results were a bit harsh for the two photos that had the darker backgrounds due to the glass layer so I re-photographed the pendant both on the elevated glass and on the glass placed on the white background. But I placed a small piece of white on top of the glass so that I could see it in the upper left corner in the viewfinder. I could have cropped this out but have left a small amount in the photo to show how this was done.

Here are the original, un-corrected photos and below them are the photos after PhotoShop.





This time the background point to be brought up to white was chosen from the small white area in the upper left because I know that this should be white. Again the curves tool was used to bring the point’s R, G and B values up to 245 and the shadows were set at 65.

The moral of the story is that, yes, using a layer of non-reflective glass, either elevated or placed directly on the background, will darken the background in the photo. But by photographing the object placed directly on a white or partially white background the light areas can be corrected to white. Also, a small, croppable white sample placed on to of the glass can be used as a valid color correction point.

I have a page on my web site that explains the techniques that I use for jewelry photography.