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Many of my jewelry designs feature warm-colored berries that look wonderful paired with gold.
While I love working with karat gold, its market price is now so high that using even 14 karat gold in solid form can make jewelry prohibitively expensive. Using 14 karat Gold-Filled chain
and findings lets me make the beautiful warmth of gold available in my jewelry while keeping the quality high and the price affordable.
Gold-Filled materials are quality materials that can be expected to last a lifetime. I use
14/20 gold-filled, which is made by using extreme pressure and heat to bond a sheet of 14 karat gold over a brass base. The resulting product is a wire or tube in which the gold layer represents 1/20th of the volume of the piece. This material is then formed into chain and other jewelry findings that are strong, durable, and resistant to tarnish.
The gold layer of gold-filled materials is many, many times thicker than the coating on gold-plated or “gold vermeil” materials. As a result you can expect to wear and enjoy your gold-filled jewelry for many years without worry of having the gold layer wear out.
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I enjoy designing one-of-a-kind jewelry pieces using the sparkle of faceted semi-precious gemstones to highlight my glass berries. I often use gemstones with good clarity, but many times I opt for more opaque stones because they can give the best impression of immature berries or leaves in the "background" of the piece.
Where true sparkle is the goal I often choose colored faceted Cubic Zirconia. By using these manmade gemstones I get all the incredible clarity and refractive index of high quality diamonds, at a fraction of the cost of natural stones. This allows me to make the most beautiful jewelry possible while keeping the prices within the means of most collectors.
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You can clean any of my jewelry, whether sterling silver, gold-filled, or high karat gold and gemstones, simply by lathering your hands with some mild soap and rubbing your fingers over the work. Then rinse very thoroughly and dry with a soft cloth.
You may also immerse any of the jewelry in the red jewelry-cleaning liquid that's available in most grocery and department stores, then rub with your fingers or scrub with a soft toothbrush.
If your sterling silver jewelry is badly tarnished you may dunk it in Tarn-X liquid. Tarn-X won't hurt the glass but it is corrosive, so just dip for a few seconds and rinse immediately. Do not use Tarn-X on the gold-filled or gemstone jewelry.
The most important thing about all these methods is to rinse thoroughly afterward. You must remove any soap or chemical residue from inside the bead crevices and especially from beadholes of the transparent crystals or gemstones, where it would make them look dull. Then just dry with a soft cloth.
The glass raspberries tend to look a bit dry after they've been soaped. They actually improve with wearing because picking up a little oil from your skin gives the surfaces a soft sheen. You can hasten this process by dabbing a little baby oil or mineral oil on your fingers. Wipe off most on a cloth so there's just a little shine left on your fingers - then rub them over the surface of each raspberry to give it a lovely soft glow.
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