Have a goal in mind

Lewis Caroll said "If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there."

We begin the jewelry design process by first determining where we want to go. Be prepared to answer these (and many other) questions:

Each question helps to define one or more aspects of the design, until finally all of the parameters have been defined and there are no more questions. It's sort of like going to the eye doctor...by progressing through a series of lenses, the doctor slowly narrows the possibilities until it's down to "which is clearer, this one or that one?"

Then we draw a rough hand-sketch to get a basic sense of the layout from top view, side view and through-finger view.

The devil in the details

It's one thing to find a jewelry designer who can create the perfect jewelry design for you. It's something else to find the jeweler to actually build it right. So many times we have customers who pay another jeweler to design and create a piece of jewelry, but the finished piece doesn't meet their expectations.

Joel McFadden is an award-winning jeweler for many reasons, not the least of which is the level of refinement in our finishing and polishing work. Most jewelers take time to polish the part of the piece that you see...the outside bits. We also polish the inside bits that you can't see but that nonetheless reflect through your gems. Doesn't it make sense that if the metal behind your diamond is rough and scratched that it won't look as pretty as if all that metal were bright and shining like a mirror?

We prefer to use our CAD system to create jewelry that is one-piece, rather than a collection of pieces all assembled together, but when necessary, we use a better grade of solder for the assembly even though that makes it more difficult to work with.

Finally, we use a 40-power microscope at the setting bench so that we can see every detail of your gemstones while we're setting them. Removing and resetting gemstones is always risky, but working under this kind of magnification greatly reduces that risk.

The Wonderful World of CAD

(computer assisted design)

Joel is one of the most venerable and respected CAD operators in the country, perhaps in the world. He has been working with jewelry design software since 2003, and he participated on the design review team for Gemvision/Matrix software.

The beauty of CAD is that you can see what you're going to get before we build it. You can look at your design from multiple angles, and you can make changes before we create the prototype. This greatly increases the likelihood that you'll pick up the finished piece and it will be exactly what you expected. And that is the whole basis for custom-designed jewelry - you can get exactly what you want. It's infinitely better than going to a traditional jewelry store and picking out something that is almost what you wanted...something that's close to perfect. For something with as much emotional value as jewelry has, why would you want anything less than perfect?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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