One of the first commissions I ever made, these earrings were made to turn a lonely Art Deco pendant into a lovely suite consisting of a pair of earrings and pendant. Perhaps in the future the lucky lady will get a ring to match.

I had an image of the pendant and the overall size of it, matching the stones and scaling everything down so that the design retained its harmony wasn't an easy feat. I measured out everything and planned every step so that I could reduce the chance of me making any mistakes, this didn't stop me from making any though. I will give myself some lenience in this however, because at the time I was a second-year apprentice. 

Almost immediately I ran into some troubles, I forgot that there was a step between the sapphires and the diamonds created by a difference in thickness that was required for channel setting. Additionally, at the time I hadn't done any channel setting before so I didn't know what the mount had to look like in order to be successfully set. Luckily, I had some wonderful self-employed people around me to offer advice so I was able to go back a couple of steps and sort out the early issues. 

The next part of the project involved back-holes, lots of back-holes. (A back-hole is a round hole, opened up and shaped to make the back of the piece of jewellery more attractive and to make it easier for cleaning.) Cutting out back-holes is quite a therapeutic thing once you get into the flow of it, but at the time I was on a time limit so it was a bit of a stressful thing, the earrings had a total of 34 back-holes. This isn't much when I look back, I suppose at the time I was still developing one of those essential trademarks that make a jeweller: patience.

The setter, Ash did a wonderful job, I am still grateful for him to this day and the same goes out to the mounters that gave me the much-needed advice, information that made this pair of earrings a success as opposed to a failure.