Wax Carving in Jewellery: Making Something from Nothing
There’s something quite satisfying about carving a piece of jewellery from a block of wax.
It’s a very different way of making to working with sheet metal or wire. You start with a solid block and slowly take things away — cutting, filing, scraping and shaping until a form begins to appear.
I love that process. There’s something very instinctive about it. You can have an idea of what you want to make, but the piece often changes as you work.
Some of my favourite pieces for Margot & Mila have started this way.
From an idea to a piece of wax
When I first started making jewellery, I was mostly working with traditional silversmithing techniques — cutting and shaping sheet silver, soldering, filing and polishing.
Wax carving opened up a completely different way of designing.
Instead of constructing something from separate pieces, I can start with a block of wax and carve the whole shape from scratch. It means I can make forms that would be difficult to create from sheet metal, and I can work much more freely with curves and organic shapes.
The Golden Sun Pendant, for example, started life as a piece of wax. I carved the sun by hand, gradually working out the shape and the little details before it was cast into sterling silver and eventually finished with 18 carat gold plating.
It still amazes me a little that something so solid and ordinary-looking as a block of wax can become a piece of jewellery.
Carving by hand
The tools I use are fairly simple — small carving tools, blades, files and burs — and each one leaves a slightly different mark.
A lot of the process is simply taking away tiny amounts of wax and looking at the piece from different angles. I'll often make a change, look at it, then make another very small change.
It can be quite slow.
And there is a certain amount of restraint involved, because once you've carved something away, you can't simply put it back.
Sometimes I make a mistake and have to change the design to accommodate it. Sometimes that ends up making the piece better.
That's one of the things I like about working this way. The finished piece isn't necessarily an exact replica of the idea I had at the beginning.
Texture and little imperfections
Wax is particularly good for creating texture.
I can carve little lines, indentations and irregularities directly into the surface, rather than adding texture afterwards. When the wax is cast, those marks become part of the silver. Take the shark's gills and tail fin on my hammerhead shark necklace - a perfect way to use wax to give something natural form without looking too clinical or machine made.
I don't tend to want everything I make to be perfectly smooth and symmetrical. I like a slightly irregular edge or a mark left by a tool. It gives the piece a sense of how it was made.
This is particularly important to me with handmade jewellery. I don't want a piece to look as though it could have come straight off a production line.
There are tiny decisions and imperfections in a hand-carved piece that you simply don't get when something has been designed entirely on a computer.
The lost-wax process
Once I'm happy with a wax carving, it is cast into metal using a process called lost-wax casting.
The wax model is surrounded by a special investment plaster and heated until the wax melts away. This leaves a hollow space in exactly the shape of the original carving.
Molten silver is then poured into that space.
When the casting comes back, the wax has disappeared and the piece has become silver. There is something quite magical about that moment — especially when you've spent hours looking at the original piece of wax.
Of course, it isn't finished yet.
I remove the casting sprues, clean everything up and do the final filing, sanding and polishing by hand. Depending on the piece, it might then be oxidised, textured, gold plated or otherwise finished.
So although the wax carving is the starting point, there's still a lot of traditional silversmithing involved afterwards.
Why I choose wax
There are much more modern ways of designing jewellery now. CAD and 3D printing make it possible to create incredibly precise and complicated forms, and they have their place.
But I like working with my hands.
I like the fact that I can sit down with a piece of wax and a few tools and slowly turn it into something. I like that the process isn't completely predictable, and that the finished piece carries some evidence of the person who made it.
For Margot & Mila, that feels important.
Most of my pieces are inspired by things I find beautiful in the natural world — the sun, flowers, stones, old objects and irregular shapes — and carving them by hand feels like a natural extension of that.
There is something rather lovely about making a piece of jewellery from almost nothing, one small cut at a time.
And then, eventually, putting it on and knowing that every curve and little mark began with your own hands.
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