All jewelry — in fact, ALL engineered structures — have one thing in common; they are each and every one, no matter how complex or simple, is made up of a collection of elements.
Okay, so what the heck is an element?
It is a single repeatable item — in the case of Jewels of Ancient Lands jewelry, this consists of a bead or a small grouping or series of beads strung onto a copper, silver or 18k gold wire in the following manner:
- Form a loop at one end of the 4″ long .20 gauge copper wire.
- Wrap the end of the wire to finish the loop.
- Press the cut end of the wire deeply into the wrapping so it doesn’t catch on anything.
- Thread on a 4mm round copper bead.
- Add a spacer bead.
- Add a bead cap if wanted, with the hollow side toward the main bead.
- Add the gemstone or main bead.
- Add a bead cap rotated opposite the first cap.
- Add another spacer bead.
- Add another 4mm round copper bead.
- Make a loop to close off and finish the element.
Okay, now you can wire another element onto that one, and so forth, until you’ve made a necklace, bracelet, earrings or pendant.
Alteration of any one of the beads within the element causes that element to change quite fundamentally.
Do take the time and pay the attention to note the differences in lengths of the various configurations of caps and spacers you have decided to use in this design.
You can make serious changes in the construction just by changing the beads or the way in which the beads are threaded or placed within the element on the wire.
Note that small beads, such as Sumerian steatite, hematite or jasper beads have more protection from rubbing and impact in the elements on either side than larger beads, and the center element is more open, meaning the Sumerian beads will probably take more punishment from wear & tear.
In the case of tough stone like steatite or hematite or jasper, it’s no problem, but with glass, bone, ivory, wood, ceramic and other fragile beads, it’s best to use the more protective flared beads and caps and to keep the size of the primary beads slightly smaller than the protective side-beads and fillers.
Note that wide-drilled coral beads can be doubled up or dome-capped in the center element, or of course, spike-dome capped.
All three examples of this type of element easily fall well within the scope and range of Hellenic Greek jewelry design formulae, and could have been found in jewelry examples anywhere from 4500 B.C. all the way up to Late Roman and Early Medieval times.
Of course, in modern times, all the previous styles become available as the ideas are re-processed, rediscovered and revived, so it’s all on the table.
You will typically see side beads in the form of spikes, donuts, wheels, hollow caps & hedgehog spacers and more.
Note that there is typically only one glass bead between domed caps.
In other examples, two Roman glass beads would be stacked together with no separator between them.
You could use a separator there, but the ancients typically did not.
It’s easy to create different designs from the same beads, but in the case of the Sampler Kit which you can get by attending one of my workshops, you get about a dozen varieties of copper findings, all different and all having different properties and effects.
The metal parts of the element are called “findings”, while the wire that holds it all together is called “wire”. Both are metal, but it creates confusion to call them “metal”.
Be specific — do you mean the wire, or the metal findings?
Typically, in ancient times, garnet would have been associated most closely with pure solid 22k gold, but the masses, meaning the hoi-polloi, the Great Unwashed, the Masses, wore mostly copper, brass and bronze, if they wore any metals at all.
Most people were unutterably poor. Who had metal Objects of Adornment?
Who had adornment? The answer is always the same — the Filthy Rich. They’re still in control, still skimming their 99% off the top.
Ah, but the metals of the ancient world were copper, brass and bronze — there are slight differences between the metals — brass and bronze are amalgams, copper is just plain copper, with trace amounts of “other”, mostly lead and nickel.
Copper looks a lot like gold, and you can actually have the copper plated with any karat level of gold you want — 18k or 24k, for very little money.
It doesn’t take a lot of gold to gold-plate something. Gold leafing, gold plating and gold-filled are three totally different things, with widely varying values.
If you doubt whether the ancients used electricity, doubt no longer. Not only were plates and serving dishes and cups gold-plated, the coins were plated, too.
An easy-to-find example of an ancient electroplated coin is back in 404 B.C. in Athens, where they produced a silver-plated Owl Tetradrachm during the war, then tested all such coins by “biting” into them with a chisel, which is why so many of them have that hash-mark right through the center. Mine don’t, and some of them are for sale, but not cheap.
Copper, on the other hand, is so much cheaper that you can make almost anything you want from it, and a lot of them, to your heart’s content.
If you were working in gold, you’d have to slow down considerably. It’s true that gold is popular and desired and highly prized and valued by almost everyone as a precious commodity, but it limits the market, and as a lowly tradesman, which includes artists and artisans, you’re not likely to run into the golfing crowd anytime soon, and they wouldn’t pay any attention to you, anyway.
So how does the gold-thing work?
Well, if you use $750 worth of gold in a jewelry item, then charge $950 for it, after you subtract the $750 metal cost you have in it, you’ve barely made $200 for all your labor, and what’s more, that’s probably not “net”.
Furthermore, you took a high risk — $750 of your own hard-earned money to buy the gold and hope someone comes along who likes what you did with it enough to pay you what it’s really worth.
Having the right customer doesn’t happen much anymore. You’re not seeing people in person. You’re actually hoping that they somehow stumble onto your promotional message and find your stuff.
This is an event so rare that it makes news headlines when it happens.
You have a better chance of selling gold items at a better price if you’re on a fancy website, but if you’re in the typical online situation, you have to convince them that you’re strictly Park Avenue, and that ain’t easy.
When you’re offering 18 karat gold items, you’re taking on some additional artistic burden which may lie outside your present art & skills.
What I mean is, most artists are lousy at People Skills.
In the meantime, you’ve gotta convince a customer to pay for the gold, but if you fail to convey that the gold has cash value on any street, you won’t get their sympathy and they won’t pay the price, unless you’re a celebrity artist, in which case you can make the thing from doggie doo and they’ll still pay a fortune for it, provided the signature can be verfied.
If you don’t mind it getting melted down from a work of art, gold can be exchanged anytime for its melt price, which is the same as a cash rebate, but no matter how persuasively you argue the point, I’ll tell you right now, THE CUSTOMER WILL NOT GET IT.
You’ll never convince the customer that they’re getting MONEY back in the form of SOLID GOLD, so give up and work in copper and silver, like the rest of us.
You might like the “Japanese Lantern” cap that I sell quite a lot of, when I can get them in stock — sometimes it takes as much as 18 months — a year and a half — to get some beads, especially copper.
The factories that make the beads don’t always make the same beads every year.
You can also get a floral cap, or a leaf cap, or a large or small dome cap, or a leaf & hedgehog combo, or no cap, but with a hedgehog between the beads in the center, dorje style.
These are just a few examples of the thousands of combinations you can come up with on your own when you have the Sampler Set in your hands!!! You get HUNDREDS of incredible Indian copper beads in this wild assortment of caps and spacers, plus 100 4mm round spacer beads to make 50 elements, and you can make elements for .16 gauge wire that don’t include the 4mm round.
The 4mm round copper bead works well with .20 gauge wire, but does not accept .16 gauge wire, so must be eliminated from all .16 gauge designs. You can use your end-beads or make a small rondel out of .16 gauge wire wrapped on a small screwdriver shank and flush-cut on both ends, as I’ve shown elsewhere.
Caps and spacers can be shuffled around to make other great combinations. Don’t be afraid to experiment. You can try different combinations without sealing off the second end, remove beads, try others, just by keeping the end of the wire open until you decide on a pattern.
There are literally thousands of combinations that you can try.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby