Fiore d'Inverno Ring medium in silver with peridot and green 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 until it becomes a low cup and left irregular at the rim, with the folds running from the center outwards. A 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 there is the one point that has to remain flat: it is the seat of the stone, and if the cup has moved there the setting will 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 cannot be retouched, because correcting one spot means sending all the color already fired back into the fire, and at every pass you risk the bubble, the cooling crack and the color that shifts. The families have proper 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 pieces of work, and they are not attributed by eye.

03

Hammering

The shank is beaten with a hammer 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.