Fiore d'Inverno Earrings in silver with peridot and green enamel, 13 mm corollas

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 running out from the center. The wavy rim is not corrected twice — silver once stretched does not come 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 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 wet powder that a breath will move; afterwards it cannot be retouched, because correcting one point means putting all the color already fired back into the fire, and at every pass you risk a bubble, a cooling crack and the color turning. The families have names of their own and are told apart by how the metal holds the color: champlevé, when the color sits in recesses cut into the sheet; cloisonné, when it sits inside little walls of wire soldered to the ground; cold enamel, when instead of glass there is a resin that hardens without fire. They are different techniques, and they are not attributed by eye.

03

Peridot

Peridot is olivine, and its green does not come from a treatment: it is iron, in the crystal since it formed. That is why the color does not depend on how you turn it — it has no good axis and no bad one — and it stays that green with a yellow note in it that no other gem repeats exactly. The difficulty is in setting it: at between six and a half and seven on the hardness scale it is softer than the quartzes, it fears acids and sudden changes of temperature, and it almost always has inclusions that the heat of friction can open. It is polished wet and with frequent stops, and the setting is closed by pressing a little at a time: the force that settles a quartz is already too much for a peridot.

04

Post and butterfly fastening

The post passes through the lobe and a butterfly holds it at the back, two metal wings that grip the stem by themselves. It is the simplest fastening there is, and precisely for that reason it has to be done well: the post has to be soldered perpendicular to the body of the earring, because if it starts even slightly crooked the piece hangs askew on the lobe and there is no straightening it by wearing it. The butterfly, on the other hand, is the part that gets lost: it holds by friction, and friction drops off over the years until one day it no longer holds. You check it by pinching it lightly between two fingers, and when it has stopped offering resistance you change it — it costs little, and it costs a great deal less than the earring.