Fiore d'Inverno ring in silver with amethyst and yellow enamel, 14 mm corolla

How it is made

The words of the trade, one by one, explained to those who do not know them.

01

Corolla from a single sheet

The corolla is not an assembly of petals: it is a single sheet, hollowed until it becomes a shallow cup and left irregular at the rim, with the folds running out from the center. The wavy rim cannot be corrected twice — stretched silver does not go back — so the first fold is the one that stays. In the middle of the cup is the one point that has to stay flat: it is the seat of the stone, and if the cup has moved there the setting does not sit.

02

Enamel

Enamel is glass: ground to a powder, laid on the metal and taken to several hundred degrees until it melts and becomes one surface with the piece. Before the fire it is wet powder that a breath will move; afterwards it cannot be retouched, because correcting one spot means putting all the color already fired back into the fire, and every pass risks a bubble, a cooling crack and a color that shifts. The families have their own names and are told apart by how the metal holds the color: champlevé, when the color sits in hollows cut into the sheet; cloisonné, when it sits inside little walls of wire soldered to the ground; cold enamel, when in place of the glass there is a resin that hardens without fire. They are different processes, and they are not assigned by eye.

03

Hammering

The shank is hammered until the surface takes on an irregular texture. No blow is like the one before it, so no ring is like another.

04

Amethyst

Amethyst is purple quartz, and the purple does not come from a pigment: it comes from a few iron atoms that ended up in the lattice in place of silicon and were then struck by the natural radiation of the rock. That is why the color is almost never laid on evenly — it arranges itself in zones and bands, heavier on one side and paler on the other — and orienting the stone properly under the wheel is exactly what spreads it. It is as hard as citrine, the seventh degree, and can be worn every day without worrying about scratches; but that purple is the most delicate thing it has. Strong continuous light fades it, and heat erases it altogether: an amethyst heated enough turns yellow, and that is how much of the citrine on the market is born. Purple once lost does not come back.