How we make

This page is for anyone curious about how silver jewellery is actually made — what's happening at the bench during the days between a sketch and a finished piece. It's also a useful answer to the most-asked question we get from customers: "why does this cost what it does?".

Jeweller's hands holding scissors and tools at a silversmithing workbench

What "handmade" means here

"Handmade" is one of the most-used and least-meaningful words in jewellery marketing. For the avoidance of doubt, this is what handmade means at Written in Silver:

Every piece starts as a flat sheet, square wire, or round wire of sterling silver. Nothing is cast.
The piece is shaped, cut, and finished entirely at our bench. Not outsourced.
Stones are set in bezels we've shaped ourselves. We don't buy pre-made bezel-set stones.
Polishing is hand-done at the polishing motor and by hand-rouge cloth. No commercial tumbling.
The chain is the only element we sometimes don't make ourselves. We buy lengths of sterling silver chain (sourced from a UK manufacturer) and finish the clasps and joins ourselves.

The reason this matters is that "cast" silver jewellery (pieces produced from a master mould) can be made in volumes that hand-shaped silver can't match. A casting can produce 50 identical pieces in a day. A hand-shaped piece takes hours, every time. The two ways of working both have their merits, but they're not the same thing. We make the second kind.

The materials

Sterling silver

All our silver is sterling — 92.5% silver, 7.5% copper (the standard sterling alloy). We buy from UK-based bullion suppliers, primarily in sheet (typically 0.8mm and 1.2mm thicknesses), wire (round and square, various gauges), and the occasional pre-cut blank for specific shapes we don't want to cut from sheet ourselves.

The silver is recycled where the supplier offers it. The recycled stream comes mostly from electronics and industrial silver recovery; for jewellery purposes, the recycled silver is chemically identical to virgin silver.

Stones

We buy semi-precious stones from two specialist suppliers in the UK and one in Idar-Oberstein, Germany (one of the oldest gem-cutting centres in Europe). Stones we use frequently:

Amethyst — most-used stone. Deep purple, calm presence, hard enough for everyday wear (Mohs 7).
Moonstone — rainbow moonstone in particular, with the blue-white shimmer.
Labradorite, for its flash. Sourced primarily from Madagascar.
Lapis lazuli — Afghanistan-sourced, dense blue with characteristic pyrite flecks.
Citrine — natural rather than heat-treated where possible (a slightly paler colour but more honest).
Peridot, for the green tones; complementary to silver.
Garnet — both red and the more unusual green grossular varieties.
Pearls — freshwater pearls from a single UK supplier. White, pink-rose, grey.

Sea-glass

Cornish sea-glass is collected by us along the beaches of West Cornwall. The amount we can collect varies by year — a winter of strong storms turns up more glass than a calm year. We don't dive for it, dig for it, or take from sensitive coastal habitats. The pieces we use are typically 0.5–2cm across, well-rounded by years in the sea, and frosted by tumbling against sand.

Colours we find most often: clear white (most common, from old glass bottles), soft green (mid-20th-century glass), blue (rarer — typically from old apothecary or milk-of-magnesia bottles), and occasional brown or olive. Red and orange sea-glass is rare enough to be its own collector's category and we don't pretend to find more than a few pieces a year.

Close-up of sterling silver jewellery being handcrafted with traditional tools

The processes

Cutting

Pieces start with a jeweller's saw — a fine-toothed handsaw used to cut shapes from flat sheet. The blade is about as thin as a thick human hair and breaks regularly; experienced silversmiths get through several blades per day. We pierce the silver where needed (cutting internal openings) and saw around the outside of the design.

Filing and shaping

Once the rough shape is cut, files smooth the edges. Different files for different jobs — flat for straight edges, half-round for curves, needle files for tight corners. This step is slow; rushing it shows up in the final polish.

Texturing and forming

Texture is added at this stage where called for. Methods include hammering (with various texturing hammers), rolling through a rolling mill with patterned plates, sandblasting (rare. We don't have an in-studio sandblaster, so this happens at a partner workshop), and direct etching with steel punches.

Forming (bending a flat piece into a curved or three-dimensional shape) is done over wooden formers, with rawhide mallets that don't mark the silver, and with steel forming blocks. Heat is often used to make the silver more workable; annealing (heating and quenching) softens the metal between forming passes.

Soldering

Soldering is the joining of two pieces of silver. We use silver solder (an alloy of silver and other metals with a melting point below that of sterling silver itself) in three grades (easy, medium, and hard) depending on whether the joint needs to survive subsequent soldering operations.

Soldering is the part of silversmithing most prone to disaster. Too much heat melts the piece; too little doesn't make a clean joint; wrong solder grade ruins multi-step joins. Every silversmith remembers the first piece they melted by accident.

Stone setting

For pieces with stones, the next step is setting. The most common settings we use are bezel settings (a rim of silver around the stone, pressed down to hold it), tube settings (a hollow tube of silver into which a faceted stone sits), and prong settings (more delicate prongs hold the stone from above).

Setting is precision work. The bezel needs to be cut to the exact height of the stone — too short and the stone falls out, too tall and it covers too much of the stone's face. The setting is pressed down with a polished bezel pusher, then refined with a burnisher to seat the metal cleanly against the stone.

Polishing

The final stage. Polishing happens in multiple passes — starting with coarser polishing compounds (Tripoli) to remove the file marks, moving through progressively finer compounds (rouge), and finishing with hand polishing using a soft cotton cloth and silver-polishing rouge.

Pieces with texture are polished only where the smooth elements are — leaving the textured areas in their as-textured state. This selective polishing is the difference between a piece that looks crafted and one that looks merely shiny.

What that adds up to in time

A pair of simple textured studs takes about 3–4 hours of bench time spread across two or three days (allowing for solder cooling, polishing rouge cycles). A more complex pendant with a bezel-set stone is 6–8 hours of bench time across a week. A bespoke commission with multiple elements can easily be 20+ hours of bench time across several weeks.

Multiply that by an hourly rate that allows the studio to keep operating, add the materials, add the postage and packaging and a small margin for the small business that we are, and you arrive at our pricing. We're not the cheapest silver jewellery available, and we couldn't be while paying ourselves an actual living wage for the time involved.

Selection of finished handmade sterling silver jewellery ready for customers

The kitchen workbench

The bench has been in the same kitchen since 2008. It's been moved twice (when the kitchen was redecorated), it's had three different polishing motors, and it's accumulated the kind of patina that comes from eighteen years of small metal filings and the occasional sleepy spill of tea. There's a window above it that looks out over the West Cornwall lanes. It's the most-used surface in the house.