Newsletter - January 27, 2010

The Jewelry Crafter

A newsletter for the home jeweler

This newsletter will be published every 2 weeks, and will include hints and tips for your jewelry business. Any feedback or comments about the topics presented here are always appreciated. Click here to e-mail us.

If you have an idea for an upcoming article, or would like to submit an article for the newsletter, please contact us. Anyone who submits an article will receive a permanent link to their website in a special section of our link pages.

New Stock Update:

We have received some new acrylic cameos this week - Including blue Mother and Child (40x30 and 25x18), tan Lady Rose (40x30 and 25x18) and blue Lady with a Bird (40x30).

Cameos - Did You Know (part 2)

by Mary Harvey

In the last issue, we learned some interesting facts about shell cameos, and how they are produced. This week, we will talk a little bit about agate and hardstone cameo production.

There are basically 3 types of agate cameos - hand carved, ultrasonically carved, and poured.

Hand carved agate cameos aren’t carved the way that shell cameos are. These are carved with the assistance of a power lathe. The stone is dopped onto a stick, or held by hand, and moved against the diamond tipped bit of the lathe.  The design is roughed in with larger bits, and then refined with finer and finer bits until it is finished. Since final polishing after all the carving is finished would take too much detail off the carving, polishing is done in increments, before moving to the next finer bit. These hand carved cameos can take hours, even days to complete, and are quite expensive.

Ultrasonically carved cameos are done my machine, and mostly come from the Idar-Oberstein area of Germany. Basically, a brass casting is made of an original carving, and placed into the chuck of an ultrasonic carving machine. An agate blank is mounted onto a metal plate on the machine. The ultrasonic carving machine uses high frequency electricity and an abrasive in a liquid medium to chip away at the blank, until an exact copy, or clone, of the brass casting is finished. It only takes a few minutes to carve a cameo this way, but each cameo is finished by hand to make it more saleable. It is estimated that about 80% of the agate cameos on the market today are ultrasonically carved.

The third type of agate cameo is a poured cameo. This process begins with a mold of the original cameo, into which a mixture of 95% agate powder and 5% bonding agent is poured. They are less expensive than the ultrasonically carved cameos, and are a great alternative.

Being able to tell your customer about the production process of shell and agate cameos can be a great sales tool. In addition to being rather fascinating, it will give your customer a greater appreciation of how much effort goes into the creation of these miniature portraits.

Special thanks to the book Cameos, Old and New by Anna M. Miller for the interesting info on cameos.

Custom Jewelry Supply - Supplies for the Jewelry Designer or Wire Artist

The Jewelry Crafter Archive - Back issues full of useful information for your jewelry business

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