Silver openwork owl head ring with citrine quartz eyes and blue enamel

How it is made

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

01

Lost-wax casting

The model is built in wax, coated in refractory plaster and then heated until the wax runs out: what is left is a void of the exact shape, and into that void the molten silver is poured. To get the piece out the mold has to be broken, so every casting consumes both the wax and the mold, and the model you started from no longer exists. It is the way to obtain what the saw and the file could not — ribbons that overlap, undercuts, voids closed on every side — but if the metal does not reach the end of a thin branch the piece comes out incomplete, and it cannot be mended: it is melted down and begun again from the wax.

02

Figurative subject

A recognizable animal within fifteen millimeters is not obtained by adding detail: it is obtained by getting a few proportions right. In the owl there are three — how far apart the eyes sit, how much wider the head is than it is tall, where the beak ends — and whoever looks checks them all together, in one go, before even noticing the plumage. The model is carved in wax once only, and from then on every example repeats it: an eye half a millimeter higher than the other does not stay the fault of that one piece, it becomes the face of every piece that follows.

03

Openwork

The metal is drilled and then cut out from the inside with a very fine saw blade, until the solid sheet becomes a design of voids. It is a piece of work that allows no second attempt: what is taken away does not come back.

04

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.

05

Oxidizing

The silver is darkened on purpose, and then brought back to polish only where the light has to return. The black stays in the voids and the recesses, the bright on the raised work: it is a design made by subtraction, and whoever does it decides where to stop the cloth.

06

Citrine quartz

Citrine is quartz, the same mineral species as rock crystal and amethyst: all that changes is how much iron it holds and how that iron sits in the lattice. Naturally occurring yellow is rare, and most of the citrine on the market is born amethyst and turns yellow in the kiln — a stable treatment, declared in the gem trade, that cannot be told by eye. At the seventh degree of hardness it stands up to daily wear better than almost any other colored stone; but the same firing that gives it its color can also take it away, and strong continuous light or the heat of a nearby flame will drain it. The yellow that goes does not come back.