Welcome to our etsy store, we are a small family owned business that consists of myself (Steven), my wife Fran and my wife’s son Kim, all three of us have been trained in jewellery making at one time or another in our lives, before I retired I used to own antique shops and jewellery was my specialty.
We all live in the mountains behind the Gold Coast in Queensland Australia, which is about an hour from the nearest town, Fran and I built our home on a small block with magical views over hundreds of miles of the Gold Coast coastline and Kim lives a couple of minutes away from us on 35 acres of land where he has built a home and we all have our studio and workshop there.
Since we started selling old bits and pieces that were left over from when I had my antique shops we found that the charms we used to make from the molds I had taken over the years from all the antique charms that had passed through my hands were the best sellers for us on etsy, so we have slowly increased the many different designs we had available and made a couple of each one as a base stock to keep available on etsy for immediate delivery, so now all we have to do is make the few that sell each week to keep the numbers up ready for christmas which is our busy time of the year.

How we make our silver charms:

We use a process called Lost Wax Casting, which all starts after I had found an antique charm that I liked, I would then make a silicone rubber mold of it to keep and then sell off the original charm, now when I want to make a silver copy of the antique charm I first find the mold I want and using a wax injector I make a few wax models of the charm, next I sprue and build a tree using the wax models on a sprue base, then I cover it with a metal flask and pour investment over it (investment is a bit like plaster of paris), after it hardens I pull off the rubber base which leaves the wax models of the charms inside, then I put them in the oven and melt the wax out from the mold, when the mold is ready I remove it from the oven and put it into the centrifuge then heat the silver with a large torch and give it a stir with a graphite rod, then if everything goes to plan when I release the centrifuge it spins the molten silver into the flask completely, I then remove the flask from the centrifuge and place it into water which dissolves most of the investment and then into the ultrasonic with some blastoff investment remover, after that I cut off all the charm pieces from the tree and place them into a pickle solution and when they look like silver again I remove them and for any moving charms like the victorian comb I have to hammer in a silver rivet for the hinge then I clean up any rough edges using a file first and then use a polishing wheel on the flexshaft to remove any file marks then into the tumbler and when I finally take them out of the tumbler it’s onto the large polishing wheel for the final polish, when the charm is finished I add the silver sleeve which I make from sterling silver round tubing with a silver jumpring attached to it.