HELPFUL HINTS
All of our courses are designed to equip you with the skills and the knowledge to carry on making with flare and confidence at home or in your own studio. We offer a range of toolkits to get you started at home, and specialist kits to help move you along your jewellery journey. Here we have put together some helpful hints and useful reminders of some of the beginners essentials to help you get the most out of your home jewellery setup.
SETTING UP YOUR HOME STUDIO
You’ve been to jewellery class, and you’ve bought your Ultimate Tool Kit, you’re ready to start your jewellery journey. Lets talk about a basic studio setup, and some basic health and safety considerations to take into account when setting up your home studio.
INTRODUCTION TO SAW PIERCING
Let’s talk about how to use our jewellers saw. Saw piercing is one of the first techniques we take our students through at CSSJ. You’ll need your saw frame, your bench peg, and saw blades in your chosen size.
INTRODUCTION TO FILING
Now that we’ve covered sawing we need to know how to refine our rough edges using our jewellery files. Files come in all different sizes, let’s look at how to select and use a variety of files.
HOW TO MAKE A BUFF STICK
What is a buff stick and how do you make one? It’s essentially a piece of shaped dowel covered in sandpaper. Now that we’ve used our file to refine the saw marks, we need to work through a variety of grades of buff stick to remove the file marks.
INTRODUCTION TO DRILLING
Next lets talk a little bit about drilling next, how to drill safely, and when we might need to drill holes when we’re making jewellery.
FITTING A FILE HANDLE
You may have noticed that when you buy a file from a retailer, or if you bought one of our toolkits, that they come without a handle. It’s likely that your handle will out-live your file, so it can be useful to have a way to take them apart when the file is no longer useful, so you can reuse your handle for a new, sharp file.