Mark Ellsberry Jewelry

Jewelry Design

Mark Ellsberry designs will inspire you. His Jewelry studios located at The Arboretum near the UC Davis Campus is set up to creatively craft unusual and one-of-a-kind jewelry pieces. Mark combines the skills of gemstone faceting, enameling and metalsmithing in gold, silver, and copper. Many of his pieces incorporate man-made Sapphire, which has all the same mechanical and optical properties as natural sapphire at a reasonable cost. Cubic Zirconia (CZ), Spinel, Amethyst and Topaz are also favorites.

Mark Ellsberry

Mark got interested in gemstone faceting in the early 80s as a hobby. After several years of faceting, he started to incorporate the gems in custom designed jewelry by working with potential customers to choose gemstones to complement a jewelry creation that the customer has helped design. Along his journey he achieved awards for gemstone faceting and facet pattern design.

Mark studied faceting gemstones under Francis Gates a Master Faceter in Costa Mesa, California and later studied metalsmithing at Silvera Jewelry School in Berkeley, CA.

Capabilities

There are many techniques of making jewelry. They can generally be lumped in two classes, Fabrication and casting. With these two methods virtually any piece of jewelry can be created..

Lost Wax Casting

The jewelry piece is completely created in the form of a wax model. The design is only limited by your imagination and certain size constraints The wax model is mounted on a rubber base

Lost wax Process

A flask is paced over the rubber base and the flask is filled with a plaster like material to form a mold image of the wax in the plaster. Then the whole assembly is heated to burn out the wax pattern and leave a mold for the piece of jewelry. Molten silver or gold is poured into the mold . Finally the cast silver piece is removed from the plaster and polished.

Jewelry "Fabrication"

The fun of designing a fabricated piece of jewelry is in picking out the various components to assemble it and to pick out just the right color and shape of gemstone to be incorporated in to the design.

The first step is to select a gemstone for the piece, it can be a cabachon (as shown) or a faceted precious stone. Also this is the time to pick the metal for the piece.

Ring Bezel

The bezel wire is cut to a length that tightly fits around the stone to be mounted. Then the bezel wire is formed around the stone and soldered together. The bezel wire is soldered to the base plate and the base plate is trimmed evenly around the bezel wire.

Ring Shank

To make a ring shank, choose a piece of half round silver wire. Measure to the proper length to make the ring the proper size. Then bend the wire into a circle and solder the ends together.

Finished Ring

After soldering the ring shank to the subassembly, the stone is mounted by crimping the gallery wire around the stone and polishing the entire thing. Your ring is ready to wear.