I've been busy with
teaching jewellery making at Chesham. This term we're tackling basket setting. Or prong setting, depending on what you want to call it. I aimed to make this setting accessible for all levels, although I did recommend that people do a bezel setting before starting on basket setting. My idea was to build up accuracy slowly over several projects. I wanted to instill confidence and make the projects achievable. Each element of these projects (size of wire, size of stone, type of stone, type of bail, finish of prongs etc) has been chosen for achievability. The day class is much longer, so the evening classes are necessarily working slower because they are 2 hours long (day class is 5.5 hours). I thought carefully about the building up of these lessons, so that nobody got too frustrated. So far, allowing for predictable mishaps when attempting these new techniques, my students are doing phenomenally well!
So, this is what we're working on:
1. one tier basket setting for round cabochon stone (hard, preferably CZ) with jump ring bail:
2. two tier basket setting for round cabochon stone with tapered bail on prong
3. one tier oval basket setting for oval cabochon stone with jump ring bail to be combined with triangle bail or second jump ring
4. two tier oval basket setting for oval cabochon stone
5. After half term, we head into faceted round stones, so we start with this 12mm round cz:
All of the above are my samples, here are some photos of student work thus far:
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