Medium Fiore d'Inverno ring in silver with iolite and yellow enamel

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 into a shallow cup and left irregular at the rim, with the folds starting at the center and going outwards. The wavy rim is not corrected twice — stretched silver does not come back — so the first fold is the one that stays. In the middle of the cup is the only 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 a wet powder that a breath will move; afterwards it is not retouched, because correcting one point means sending all the color already fired back onto the fire as well, and at every pass you risk the bubble, the cooling crack and the color that shifts. The families have their own names and are recognized by how the metal holds the color: champlevé, when the color sits in hollows cut into the sheet; cloisonné, when it sits inside small 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 techniques, and they are not attributed by eye.

03

Hammering

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

04

Iolite

Iolite changes color according to the direction it is looked at from: along one axis it is a full blue-violet, along another it is almost colorless. The color of each bead is therefore decided by the cutter, at the moment of choosing how to orient it, and on a strand half a meter long that choice is repeated bead after bead. It is the reason why in a strand of iolite the beads are never all the same blue.