How To Make Jewelry By Hand

Series Summary

Do you have an idea for a beautiful necklace design? From earrings and bracelets to single stranded and elaborate multi-stranded necklaces, creating your own jewelry is fun, easy to learn, and can even be done at home. All it takes is the desire to create, the willingness to learn, and finally practicing your newly acquired craft. Making your own jewelry is a fun way to express your creative fashion talents. Whether you want to work with beads, stones, gems, metals, hemp or any other material, the basic construction methods are fairly simple. Custom handmade jewelry also makes a fine gift for birthdays or holidays.

In this free video series, our expert DJ Poye will teach you how to make jewelry. SHe will show you the tools you'll need to sketch and design new pieces of jewelry. DJ will show you every step to making the jewelry you designed including how to glue the sketch to the metal, how to draw more complex pieces, how to prepare the saw and start cutting the piece, how to drill and punch out the interior spaces, how to remove the tracing paper, and how to initial and mark the piece of jewelry. DJ will then show you how to brush, texture, smooth, file, & polish the piece, how to hammer it, how to make a bale for the chain, how to solder the piece, and how to use pickling solution to clean it. She'll then show you how to finish the piece by buffing and polishing the jewelry, she'll do a final clean, and then show you where she might put some gemstones in it. When this series is done, you'll have seen a beautiful piece of jewelry made from start to finish!

Video Transcript

"I'm DJ Poye, professional Jeweler/Gemologist, and I'm here today on behalf of Expert Village. I'm a 30-year bench Jeweler/Gemologist as of this year. I have had studios and galleries in four different states, and I'm residing here in Sedona now. And we're going to make a piece of jewelry today. So, come on into my studio. Hello again. Well here we are in my small but very efficient little studio, and I want to invite you to help me create a hand fabricated piece of jewelry today. One of the very first things I went when I was in school, was we had to get comfortable with the metal. We had to work with a lot of different metals until we got really comfortable with it. Then we moved on to the next processes. What we're going to do today is, our first stage, we're going to create it by doing a simple rendering. Coming up with the design, for myself, they come so quickly it's hard to do the rendering. So I don't do a lot of renderings. But I am going to have to custom create a piece for an individual. I will offer rendering and draw several different drawings up and they can choose whatever they decide they'd like to choose. The other day, I was sitting at breakfast where it's quiet and I drew a simple drawing of a pendant that I would like to do. It was a real quick sketch. It's always in a larger scale. From this particular scale, I start bringing it down to a smaller scale. "