This client found me online. She reached out with a request about a sterling silver bracelet. She absolutely loves the Tiffany Elsa Peretti bone cuff, the problem was that she is really tiny and her wrist is a child’s size, smaller than Tiffany’s carries in this style. Now most, if not all, of Tiffany’s designs are copyrighted and legally cannot be duplicated. So I changed the design a bit, using the beloved Tiffany bracelet as inspiration. She shipped all of the sterling silver jewelry she was no longer wearing so that we could use it in this creation. She had a ton of pieces. I worked up an estimate to make her custom design. From the CAD to the model to the flask charge and casting, then cleaning and final polishing. All in it was on the expensive side. To satisfy my own curiosity I went to the Tiffany’s website, found the bracelet that she loved and – to my surprise – discovered that it’s now available in an extra small wrist size! Even more amazingly, the cost for this bracelet direct from Tiffany’s would be less than what it’d cost to have me make up something similar. So I let her know and emailed the link. Her response was, “WOW! This is the first time anyone has offered that!” She very appreciative of my honesty and proceeded to tell me that she has another project in mind. We set up a video call to discuss, exploring what she was envisioning. We then set a date for her to drive up from New Jersey. She came with several bags of goodies, her engagement ring and a lovely pair of diamond stud earrings. As I have done with others, we combined the diamonds into one ring, using her original engagement ring. I added the earrings’ diamonds to either side of the ring’s center diamond. The biggest alterations here were the settings. We used what is known as tulip setting. The prongs are an outline of a petal so that light can pass into and through the diamonds from the side and top of the stones. This client was a delight to work with and I was ecstatic to see how thrilled she was with the end result.
- Materials: Platinum, Natural diamonds
- Client location: New Jersey