by Paula Atwell

Created on: March 30, 2009

Jewelry making is a fine craft, not an art. Jewelers use their hands, and tools to create their craft. And there is no shame in categorizing jewelers as craftspeople. Jewelers are craftspeople of the finest sort. Jewelry is most closely related to other crafts like woodworking where the creator uses tools and raw materials to build something new. It is related to art, but different.

All fine crafts, including jewelry making include a design element. Jewelers start with a design concept which is carefully planned. Many jewelers then draw out their design on paper or on a CAD machine similar to a blueprint for a building or interior design.

Like any fine craftsperson, a jeweler has to choose his or her materials carefully for durability, uniqueness, and design compatability. this is also similar to other crafts. The only difference is what the raw materials are. In jewelry making the raw materials are metals, and precious and semi-precious stones.

Jewelers who go to art school are trained in both art and design. They train in metalsmithing which involves the laborious tasks of sawing their designs out of sheet metal, usually copper, nickel silver, or sterling silver. They also learn soldering, metal forming, and finishing. These are the same skills a blacksmith learns, except they are on a smaller scale. For jewelers, all of these steps take intricate, detailed work that is very time consuming and exacting.

Most jewelers are also trained in lost wax casting to create designs. In this kind of jewelry making, the design is created in wax which is used to make a mold of the design. Molten metal, usually silver or gold, is pured into the mold to make the cast. Once the metal has cooled it is finished and polished. Finishing jewelry uses skills with many tools that you have probably heard of before-hammers, torches, sandpaper-ery similar to woodworking or carpentry.

Jewelers also learn to set stones in metal, most often using either prongs or a bezel to secure the stone. Jewelers need to become educated in gemology and geology to buy the best materials available for their designs. Selecting and setting stones is very similar to interior decorating and design, finding the right stone for each piece or designing the piece around the stone. Of course, one may ask whether interior design and decorating is an art or a craft also.

There also many craft skills used in costume jewelry making. Some common techniques are wire wrapping, glass fusing, enameling glass on metal, and creating designs out of found objects. Each of these techniques involves skills related to other crafts, and tools that that involve firing, cutting, molding and attaching.

Every aspect of jewelry making takes the excellent skill of a fine craftsmaster that is well trained and and expert in their technique, along with the knowledge base to go along with that skill. This is why I consider jewelry making a craft, not an art.

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