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Designed and entirely handmade by goldsmith artist Kerstin Laibach ... including chains and closing mechanisms.

Jewellery Designer or Goldsmith Artist ... What is the difference?

The following analogy is an excerpt from a Looking-Glass.co.uk article. It makes a fascinating argument why you should expect a jewellery maker claiming his or her work as "handmade" ... to be actually handmade:

" "Craftwash" is the term we have coined to describe craft makers claiming to be handmade but using off-the-shelf pre-manufactured parts and casting /molding processes which subsequently leave none or very little of an item truly handmade - but perhaps with just a little bit of assembly and polishing required at the end. When a village tea shop sells "homemade" cakes you expect the cake to be entirely made by the cake maker. So if the cake maker bought fruit and sponge cakes and a pack of icing from the supermarket and simply decorated it with hundreds and thousands, you would either a) probably not know the difference or b) feel cheated.
You would imagine that when a jewellery designer and maker creates his or her own individual jewellery piece that the all the crafting work was handmade by the "maker". But this is often not the case. The more intricate pieces that go into a piece of jewellery, which require a lot of skill and effort to make by hand, are now made by machines in factories. These are called findings. Findings are bought as ready-made stock and include complete chains, closing mechanisms, earring backs, clasps, cufflink mechanisms and even entire rings (called blanks). In many cases findings can make up as much as 50% of the entire piece of jewellery and with band rings almost 100%.
An extreme end of faux-crafting, a high percentage of the dumbed-down generation of "jewellery designers" don't even make any part of their pieces ... the design is drawn out on a computer with a few mouse clicks, rendered into a 3d model and then cast in precious metals.
There are however one or two aspects of fine jewellery making which may require specialist skills of another hand or caster, such as some precious stone setting, certain engraving techniques and casting from wax designs for more commercial jewellers to produce repeats; and these are (up to a point) an accepted part of jewellery creation outsourcing.
But using findings (and consistently cast pieces) as a way to cut complex or laborious corners, and to even deceive the customer into thinking the piece is handmade, is not a practice entertained by genuine goldsmiths offering entirely hand-produced pieces ..."

This excerpt reproduced here with permission of Looking-Glass.co.uk.

MORE INFORMATION

See also ... Quantifying green ethics of the jewellery trade

Precious metal mining and our environmental ethics

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