Recycle Your Old Gold Into Something You Love

A friendly reminder/PSA, since these messages can sometimes get lost in the fray: Talisman will take your old scrap gold - family baubles that don’t fit your taste (or quite literally don’t fit), that necklace your ex gave you, etc etc - and turn it into something you love. Many jewelers can’t offer this because it’s actually not as simple a process as you’d think. Simply melting down antique gold jewelry can lead to brittle and unstable castings. However, I am lucky to have a connection to a very kind refiner who will take our little bits of 10k, 14k and 18k gold and give us the same gold back, refined and ready to reuse. This is important to many of my customers, who wish to retain the energy of the original heirloom piece. I, for one, am a big believer that gold retains the energy of the wearer within it - it is, after all, one of the best conducting elements we know of. So why not recycle that gold that’s sitting in your jewelry box, and turn it into a piece you will wear every day again?

Turning Your Old Gold Into New Treasure

Custom 18k gold ring, handmade using the client’s own melted gold.

When three different clients approach you within a one month span, all asking if you can melt their old family jewelry down to make something new, you know it’s something you need to look into. While melting scrap gold might sound simple enough, in actuality it’s a little more complicated, and not all jewelers will do it. Most gold refiners won’t return you with the exact same gold you gave them - they’re far too busy for such “small” requests. And simply melting down aunt Judy’s ring in the crucible and throwing it into the new casting is both risky and very costly: not only can that metal become brittle and a little unpredictable, but when done this way, the jeweler needs to come up with enough gold to fill the entire “tree” and “sprue” in the casting (the lines through which the molten gold travels to get to your new ring)… aka that requires thousands of dollars more gold than is needed for the individual piece itself. Hence my earlier statement that many jewelers simply won’t do it.

Pre-casting, the ring is first carved in wax. I wanted this weighty cigar band to have a subtle asymmetry to it, playing on offset angles.

By happenstance, though, I discovered that I actually have a special connection to a gold refiner who WILL return your own precious family gold to you, in a chunk of solid, pure 24k. Luck? Coincidence? Maybe a bit of both. But all of this is to say, that after some time and research, I finally got the process down, and have been able to make these customers new gold jewelry that they’ll love and wear everyday, out of their old gold jewelry that, while heirloom, was wasting away in a box. So why not transform your old 10k, 14k and 18k gold pieces that you don’t love, into something that you do? Nothing more alchemical than that, I’d say. To inquire, just shoot me an email at vanessa@talismanfinejewelry.co.

Fresh out of casting, the ring still has bits of “sprues” attached to it that must be ground off, followed by multiple steps of sanding and polishing to get to the final product.

The finished product! Solid 18k refined heirloom gold. It will forever hold the energy of the client’s family heirlooms.

Another pic of the finished product.