Customer Reviews

Jewelry Making and Design: An Illustrated Textbook for Teachers, Students of Design and Craft Workers

5 star:		(2)
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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

First published in 1918, this book is two books in one: First, a wonderful introduction to jewelry making, walking step by step from basic sawing to casting and enameling. Second, it includes an introduction to design. If you like very modern, abstract pieces, this book is not for you. If you're a fan of the antique look, you've found a gem.

I was pretty disappointed with this book. From the one review posted, I thought it would have some interesting information about techniques and equipment that I could translate into my own jewelry-making. Unfortunately, most of what is included is unusable for anyone except the professional crafter who has a significant amount of money already invested in equipment like kilns, soldering tools, polishing benches and a melting furnace.

I didn't expect perfect pictures and illustrations in a soft cover book, but the images contained are one of my biggest peeves with this book. They're grainy, dark and not useful for showing technique or design at all. The illustrations are better, but don't always match the chapter they appear in, making it hard to decipher exactly what lesson you're supposed to be learning from them.

There is scant attention paid to basic jewelry making. This is almost entirely a metalsmithing book. Unless you're interested in casting, pouring and soldering, there isn't much here to attract the casual jewelry-maker. The final third of the book talks about the elements of design and function, which any high-schooler who's taken art class probably already knows. Concentrating mostly on how to translate shapes from nature into jewelry, I wouldn't call the designs in this book "traditional" in any sense. While not abstract or modern, the shapes that make up the bulk of this book do not appear in traditional, simple jewelry. This stuff is ornate and overly-large and (dare I say it?) tacky.

I'm searching for something positive to say about this book, but about the only thing that comes to mind is that it gives you a good idea about how the professionals go about making jewelry from raw base metal and metallurgic powders. I'm hoping a second reading of the design section will reveal something new to me, but the first 3/4 of the book discouraged me so much, I'm not sure I'm interested in reading it again.

This is a Dover reprint! Unless you just fell off the turnip truck this morning. Why would anybody think it would contain the latest high tech info on Jewelry. It is what it is a great source/resource of ideas and basic info on how it was done in the day. It is set up as a text book with problems/projects in the first half of the book. It covers in detail the working of making any number of interesting pieces. If you know some about the tools and materials used by todays hobbyists you should have no trouble in adjusting the procedures to work with modern equipment. The kilns referred to are for enameling of some of the designs and that can be done on the stove top or with a torch with the supplies available today.
The second half is a well written and covers in depth design issues and how to surmount them.
The drawings are of the line type with plenty of descriptions to go along with them. Using a scanner and computer one will find enough ideas to enlarge/reduce and combine to play with. The pictures of the equipment are somewhat dated. But if you are going to open a manufacturing jewelry shop you would be looking to current supply catalogs anyways. I own it and like it.

While this isn't a book for rank beginners to learn how to set up a jewellery making studio and start crafting, it can be a great source of inspiration for those starting out in jewellery design, especially for those with a love of antique jewellery styles.

The original of this book was published in 1917, that's why the illustrations and photographs aren't quite what you'd expect from a newer publication, however I believe they are a good complement to the text and in keeping with learning authentic antique Arts and Crafts jewels.

The previous reviewer, B. Wilson, finds that the designs are not "traditional", nor "simple" - this is quite correct! And deliberately so. The late Victorian and Edwardian jewellery, if it wasn't directly of the Art Nouveau or Arts and Crafts schools of design, was usually influenced somewhat by them, and both were a move away from "classic" or "traditional" jewellery settings and designs; and also a good deal of Edwardian jewellery was deliberately large and perhaps ostentatious to cater for the tastes of the nouveau riche and the trends set by Queen Alexandra. Our contemporary ideas of what constitutes inspiration from nature have also been tempered by nearly 100 years of further design trends from Art Deco to Avant Garde to Ethnic and so on.

While a modern sensibility might find the designs in this book "tacky", it can still be useful to study the crafting of such as part of the jewellery making tradition, much as architects, for example, might study Baroque and Gothic architecture in order to understand how we have come to modern styles and also for re-interpretation into contemporary designs.

And for lovers of antique jewellery design, it's hard to go past an instruction manual to make your own replicas!