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 inside 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.