Free tutorial – bezel set cabochons
Found another useful step-by-step today, on the Art Jewelry magazine website: How to set a cabachon in a bezel. It’s a plain bezel setting around an oblong stone, illustrated with photos. The article assumes you know how to solder silver, but it has a great tip about how to test that the stone fits without it getting stuck in the setting (not telling – go read!).
They have a couple of videos too, and a bundle of other great how-to articles, under the Related Articles section at the bottom of the page. I’d forgotten how useful Art Jewelry mag was, because my local newsagent stopped stocking it a while back. Before then it seemed to be going over to wirework/metal/polymer clay, which I’m not so interested in, and that coincided with my growing interest in lapidary (and thus swapped my purchase of “bling mags” to Lapidary Journal).
P.S. No, I don’t get any freebies for recommending any of this…
Craft & Design Magazine
Rings & Things
I did the floss trick and it pulled through…now my stone is stuck…any suggestions?
Hi there!
If you have bent the bezel over, you will have to open it up again – it’s tricky, but you can do it with your thumbnail or a set of engineering “feelers”. Then winkle the stone out using the following method.
If you haven’t pushed the bezel over the stone, that’s easier. Try using a big blob of blu-tack stuck to the tabletop – push the stone and setting down onto the blob, lift it off carefully. If this fails, then you may have to consider using a blob of dop wax on a dop stick to hold the stone securely and pull the setting off when it’s hardened.
The drastic option is to drill a hole in the back of the setting (while risking damage to the stone) and push the stone out with a pointy stick.
Good luck!
A.