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. And simply melting down aunt Judy’s ring in the crucible and throwing it into the new casting is both risky and very costly. 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.
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.