New Studio
When I first saw my house on Zillow I noticed that this old colonial is on a hill, which means the basement is probably above ground. So there would be windows in my studio. At first glance, I couldn't tell for sure if that was the case since the house needed so much work that the seller only put photos of the exterior. Luckily I guessed right and now I have some natural light in front of my workbench.
My first jeweler's bench. A gift from my mentor, gemologist, Melissa Tyler.
For the past few months, I've been slowly putting together my first real jewelry studio. I had a decent space in our condo, but the room was too attractive to risk ruining the floor. With all of my tools and materials for torching and piercing silver, there's always a chance of dropping hot metal on the floor.
Besides stains, silver dust gets everywhere and the clumpy liquid that I dip my silver in before torching gets all over my desk and on the wood floor. Not good. I now have an above ground basement, with windows, in the fixer-upper that my husband and I just bought. It’s an old house and maybe someday we'll turn the basement into some sort of den, but for now, it's my jewelry studio/ laundry room.
There's plenty more to be done down here, but it's getting better every day.