A Golden Bean

Maybe this is what inspired me, what made my brain begin thinking about golden beans. Maybe it was holding this beauty last fall.

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It had been a long time since I had seriously made jewellery, and a few weeks after seeing this I had several ideas for chocolate themed sterling silver jewellery pieces.

Now gold is a different story. Gold is a whole different game. I do and have worked with gold, but it’s an expensive metal. Precious. But in my mind I had golden bean floating around. I might have made it for myself, however yellow gold has never been my favourite metal. My own wedding bands (that hubby and I designed together and I made) are made of 14KT white gold. So still the ‘golden bean‘ floated around in my head.

Then, one day came a message from a customer who had purchased a silver cacao bean, ‘Can you make it in gold?’

‘Yes’ So off I went finding out the market value of gold since it changes daily, yes daily, it’s gold!

I sent off a quote a few days later and waited to see if the customer was still interested.

Indeed they were. So, once the piece was ordered I went about making it happen. Ordering gold, getting the casting part of the process moving, a quick trip to Montreal for all things jewellery related. (There may have been a chocolate stop or two along the way!)

Then, there it was, in my hands, a golden bean, a golden cacao bean.

It wasn’t pretty at this point, and if you had seen it you may not have thought it was gold. It still needed a lot of work to become a work of wearable art.

So work on it I did.

Gold is gold, and in the process I lost some gold, trying my best to catch it and keep it. The beauty of metal is that it can be remelted and reused, so any ‘extra’ goes into something else in the future. It’s actually kinda cool.

Once the sawing, filing, touching up, tumbling, polishing and shining were all done the piece looked amazing. So, so good. I almost wanted to keep it for myself.

Instead I took many photos, then I wrapped it up to protect it and sent it off to another country. It was destined to be added to a charm bracelet. Hoping it made the journey safely, waiting to share the photos until the customer had received the piece.

I had such a great time making this piece, and I hope you enjoyed all the photos of it. Let me know if you have any questions or have an idea for a custom piece.