Why Hand Engraving?

You've heard us say it time and again: what you'll typically find in retail stores is stamped jewelry with computerized fonts. How are we different? We're taking old-world style hand-engraving and combining it with calligraphic mastery you can't find anywhere else in the world. Literally. Just a little difference in what you'll find between mass produced items and our personalized heirlooms (a little tongue-in-cheek humor for you there).

Don't get me wrong, hand stamped jewelry has its place. But you just can't capture the art and timeless beauty we're looking to create in hand stamping.

"It would be so much easier if you came up with a stamp and just stuck with that." Maybe.

"You do it all by hand? Doesn't that take a while?" You have no idea.

"So why hand engraving?"

Let me break down what our style and method actually entail from start to finish.

1. Pendant in putty. Whatever pendant we're currently working on will be held by putty that will help keep the pendant in place once it's fitted to the engraver's block. The putty is softened to wrap the pendant around and hardens as it cools. This part was all pretty foreign to me if I'm being honest until we got into a steady groove of orders and got the hang of our process. This step is crucial to the entirety of the engraving process as the putty are the "hands" on the engraver's block.

2. Sketched and formatted. Every order that comes through the studio is sketched onto the surface of the metal itself. This allows Jake to have guidelines as he engraves because once you start with the engraver's chisel, there's no margin for error as whatever is engraved is permanent. He uses a soft pencil to format the lettering to strategically and artistically fill out whatever surface area he's working with.

3. Putting chisel to metal under 30x magnification. Without pictures, you probably would have no idea what I'm talking about or understand the literal magnitude that it takes to engrave such small, precise lettering onto one of our pendants. Here, Jake takes all focus into one swivel of the chisel at a time. Depending on what Jake's engraving, one pendant can take up to six hours under the microscope. 

Engraving is a literal etching into the metal and the script we employ in all of our signature styles can only be achieved with hand engraving. We toyed with a few other ideas of creating "easier ways" to produce the same level of artistry, but we haven't come up with anything that compares to the beauty of what we're doing now. 

So as you browse our collection, you now have an idea of what kind of time and talent goes into each one as they are done by hand in every step of their creation process.

Have a question about our process that isn't answered here? Contact us. We always love sharing more about what's involved on our end to create lasting heirlooms for you.