Rebecca Zemans Jewelry Blog — custom

Welcome to our ongoing series exploring the different types of metals we work with!  Palladium is a metal we are seeing more requests for in additional to traditional metals, so we wanted to educate our customers about some of the great characteristics of palladium.  Palladium is a silvery-white metal with similar properties to platinum, however it is the least dense of the platinum group metals, making it a more affordable metal option than platinum.  It is named after the Pallas asteroid which was discovered around the same time as the metal, at the turn of the 19th century.  Over half...

We hope everyone has been having an excellent summer!  The studio has been busy working with couples to create special wedding bands all season long, as well as custom tailored anniversary and birthday presents.  Our favorite projects always seem to involve heriloom materials and the transformation which takes place in using something old to create something new. Our most recent heirloom redesign was for a client's wedding band using elements of a ring from her Oma.  Our client works with her hands and needed a durable wedding band that suits her lifestyle, yet wanted to incorporate materials from family heirloom...

Hi Everyone! Today we are continuing our metals blog series with a post about fine silver. In case you missed it, in our previous post we discussed sterling silver, which is an alloy of fine silver. Fine silver is 99.9% pure silver, compared to sterling silver which is only 92.5% pure silver. Fine silver is very soft, making it more prone to scratches and dents. On the bright side, its softness is the reason fine silver pieces tend to mend themselves to your body and can be very comfortable to wear. It also does not tarnish, which is great if...

With Spring upon us, we wanted to share the new custom pieces we've been working on this Winter. We've been so busy that we realized we hadn't shown you many new pieces in a while. So here is a glimpse of some of our most recent work. We couldn't have done it without our amazing clients whose vision make these designs possible!  We always love making our customers dreams come true because it pushes our creativity and skills keeping us fresh and on our toes. For example, we worked with Palladium for the first time, which can be a difficult...

Today we will share with you some insight on one of our most important processes - forging. Forging is the process of shaping the metal using force. Forging can be done either hot or cold, depending on the metal. For our silver and gold jewelry, we use the cold forging process after annealing the metal. Meaning, we hit the metal while it is cold after heating it up to loosen the molecules and then cooling it off so we can hold it while hammering it. Hot forging is when you hit a portion of the metal while it is hot,...