For over 20 years I had always wanted to design and make a pair of spiral earrings, but even with years at the goldsmith’s bench making handmade jewellery I would always end up with a disappointing result. My frustration was a result of the most obvious and vital aspect of spiral earrings - a spiral object generally varies in thickness, it usually becoming wider as you travel from the center outwards towards the end of the tail with a smooth and continuous line - this is fine if you are just making one spiral.
The problem begins when you want to make a left and a right matching version which is what you need when you are making a pair of earrings. You start with the first spiral - you melt and mill out the gold carefully draw with a metal scribe the shape that you want. Cut each earring out carefully and then drill holes for the diamonds to be set, and then spend hours carefully applying gold wire galleries to the sides of the earrings in order to add depth and strength. Finally you file and finish the two parts, before flipping them over to discover that the left earring has a slightly different curve and goes a little too quickly from wide to narrow. Oh the frustration. .
So then you melt up four hours hard work, re-mill the resulting lump of gold, but this time leaving it with a double thickness. Then going through the whole shenanigans again, but this time after cutting out the spiral you slice it into two, giving you a perfectly symmetrical left and right.
Great! Until you realise that while the overall shape is fine, hand sawing a 4mm thick sheet of gold results in two pieces with a very slight but nevertheless noticeable wedge shape underneath each one ,which will never pass muster. After a few more unsuccessful attempts you are distracted by a new design and you just give up.
Decades pass until one day, walking past Goldsmiths Hall in London I chanced upon an exhibition and lecture on 3D modelling and discovered there a whole new world of possibilities. Since that fine summer’s day I have made 3 different versions of spiral earrings. It’s so simple - I fire up the computer and build my model by drawing the outside shape - add an inside curve to match and nudge and tease the lines into the ultimate spiral, with a pleasing curve which is spot on. I offset a curve, highlight both lines then with a click on my mouse I extrude the whole 3D object and virtually chop out some holes for the diamonds. Voila! A perfect left hand earring. Without fuss and fireworks I then draw a vertical line next to my earring, click left on my mouse to highlight the earrings linear 3D image and then click right while pressing mirror and a faultless right hand spiral earring seemingly magically appears, the mirror image and exact double of the left one that sit next to it on the screen. The rest of the labour is left up to the 3D printer and caster, but the result as you can see below is a beautiful, easy to wear and perfect pair of diamond earrings. ( every time!)