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I was approved to be in the Custom Made network of makers in August 2012. and only work exclusively through them.
I have 48 years experience as a hand manufacturing at the bench Goldsmith and Jeweler making each of the pieces you can see in my 9 page portfolio of listings once by hand, with macro close up photos sent daily through the transcript provided by Custom Made.
Many pieces pictured there have 5 extra photos of the piece at 5 different stages of being made.
I've never had to cast any thing, nor bought manufactured cast parts to assemble, to then call that "custom" or "customized"
My unique Goldsmith skills were acquired at 19 years of age in Boston. I was taught to be a Silversmith in Maine, NH, and Cape Cod, with Fire-sign Silversmiths. I was later offered an apprenticeship with Platinum worker, John Mulligan, of Mulligan & Hone Jewelers of Charles Street in Boston. I then passed up on a scholarship to go to the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts…figuring I could make a better living as a Goldsmith than as a Watercolorist.
In 1978 I opened Signet Custom Jewelers in Harvard Square Cambridge and was written-up in the April 1987 Boston Sunday Globe by Mopsey Strange Kennedy.
I operated it for 10 years until due to sudden family deaths I returned home to Ohio in 1988 when I went to work as a special order jeweler for a Tiffany Trade Account store near Cleveland, Schreibman Jewelers for 9 years, then I worked 13 years for King's of New Castle….
This diversity of experience and training is part of why my work is unlike other makers in this country who are limited to doing only wax casting and Cad-cam wax carving that also gets cast..
I am offering my customers a chance to commission a custom handmade artwork using the unique self-taught Goldsmith skills of drilling and sawing, called saw-piercing, that I uniquely combined with 3-D hand carving which I do with traditional palm push gravers, producing pieces that are more detailed, are impossible to cast, and pieces unlike any seen elsewhere….
I only use rolling mill hardened precious metal sheets that I then attach a exact-size millimeter graph paper drawing to. Then I drill, saw, and 3-D hand-carve, or sometimes I've made multi-piece, multi-metal, multi-color gold assemblages, then carve…taking photos of each step.
Each piece is a signed, quality stamped, original artwork, with time-dated progress photos sent daily through the Custom Made transcript .
By allowing you to see your piece being made by my unique Goldsmith process from drawings to completion, you get exactly what you want and assurance that your piece is the only one like it anywhere.
In July 2012, MJSA Journal did a 2-page article on me doing a 5-piece assembled and carved handmade replica of a 1-carat diamond ring from 1900 using 16 pictures I wrote captions for explaining my process.
Now I work for myself, I'm 67, retired, and am a "Freelance" Goldsmith…still using my original West German jewelers tools from 1969…a purely independent Cottage Industry, still pursuing my Goldsmith art and striving for the level of workmanship of the 'Old-Timers'…I'm getting closer with each piece.
I love the customer's ideas and requests that I have fun figuring out how to create from scratch…
Each always different from the last.
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