My jewelry washing machine!

Ever wonder how jewelry gets it's beautiful shine?

Friends who visit me in the studio are often surprised to see how my jewelry look like before they are finised.

I make most of my jewelry from scratch. This means I take raw material like silver wires or silver sheets and work with them to create my design. I cut, drill, bend, solder etc, as needed to create the design I have in mind. When I am done, the metal has the shape and form that I intended for them to have but not the color and shine of silver jewelry as you know it. Not yet.

To make them shine and sparkle they need to be cleaned and polished.

For the final step I enter my jewelry into a thumbler. There are many different kinds of thumblers, mine is a rotary thumbler. Basically it works like a washing machine - for jewelry.

I put in my jewelry with a spcial soap, set the timer and press start. The machine then starts turning and thumbling and when it's done - my jewelry comes out clean and sparkling!

I love taking the items out of the thumbler and seeing how beautiful and shiny they look. Don't you?