Sticks & Stones

Mother of pearl, abalone, and paua adorn some of my favorite pieces that leave this studio: necklaces, rings, earrings, bolo ties. Sometimes as a broad inlay and sometimes as a crushed-shell face. They look different from one another, but they are all made of the same material. That material is nacre, and care follows from how nacre is built. What is Nacre? Nacre is a layered composite. Think of it like a brick wall. Thin plates of calcium carbonate, called aragonite, stack like bricks. Thin films of an organic material called conchiolin act as the mortar between them. That architecture...

Every piece that leaves this studio is primarily made of wood, but almost none of it is wood alone. Metal rides along on nearly every band and pendant. Many pieces also carry a gemstone, a strip of shell, or a section of bone or antler. Each of those materials answers differently to water, abrasion, and household chemicals, so the care that makes sense for a finished ebony band is not always the care that makes sense for the same band with mother of pearl set into it. The useful habit is simple: identify the most sensitive material on the piece,...

Most pieces that have been worn for years don't look like they did on day one. The wood runs richer. The metal has warmed or darkened, or stayed just as bright as the day it was made, depending on what you chose. That's patina. It's not a warning sign. It's proof the piece has become yours. Patina Is Character, Not a Flaw Patina is the surface change a piece earns from being worn: light, air, skin, ordinary handling. Wood, metal, bone and antler, leather. Each one picks it up its own way. What they share is that the change comes...

Customers ask me all the time if a stone is going to scratch. Sapphire, topaz, turquoise, opal, it comes up with almost every gemstone I set. The Mohs hardness scale is the closest thing we have to a straight answer, and it's worth understanding on its own terms rather than picking up secondhand from a product description. What the Scale Actually Measures Hannes Grobe - CC BY 3.0 The test behind Mohs hardness is simple. If one mineral can scratch another, it's the harder of the two. Run that comparison against a set of ten reference minerals and you get...

Customers ask me all the time whether a wood is "hard enough" for a ring. The honest answer is that almost any hardwood is, but the Janka scale is the closest thing we have to a single number that captures durability. It's useful, with caveats. Here's how it works and where some of my favorite woods land on it. What the Janka Scale Measures The Janka test is simple. You take a steel ball, 11.28 mm across, and you press it halfway into a piece of wood. The amount of force it takes to do that, measured in pounds-force (lbf)...

There's a common assumption that harder wood is harder to work with. That's sometimes true, but hardness is only one piece of the puzzle. Some of the most challenging woods in my shop are actually quite soft. Others are dense enough to overheat my tools in seconds. Some have grain that changes direction so many times within a single piece that there's no safe angle to approach from. What's funny is that several of these difficult woods are also my favorites. The properties that make them a challenge are usually the same properties that make the finished piece extraordinary. Koa...