initialing & Marking Hand Made Jewelry
I'm DJ Poye, professional Jeweler and Gemologist, and I'm here today on behalf of Expert Village. Now we are moving forward to the next stage, which it will be the mark. Which will be...being a custom designer, I place my initials on the piece, and as well as the mark of the carat of the metal that we're using. This is sterling silver, and so I'll be doing sterling silver and my mark of my name. Okay, as I have the piece on this stainless steel block, in order to place the mark on. It's always the opposite side that you place the mark on, not the front side that I was showing you. So many times people make that mistake by putting the mark on the front, and it's not what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to put it on the back. So if you, see I have a small pitching hammer, and I also have two marks. One that has my initials on it, and one that has sterling on it. Okay, as you can tell it's kind of curved, so I found a location of where I want to place it. You always make sure it's going to be in the proper place, that you don't want the sterling to be upside down. You want it to be right side up. So I have a little small nail here just to hold the piece in place because its not going to be very much for me to hold the piece in place. And then basically what you do is find your little spot where you want to place it, and you hold it, support it with my small finger, and you start by tapping back and forth. And we basically have it. Sterling. Right there. The reason why you move back and forth with it a little bit is because its concave like that. So now you have your mark on that. That's complete. And then you move on to the next place which is your mark, which is my initial. Okay, and once again you want to make sure that the mark is going to lay in there nicely. You don't want to move by slipping when you make this mark, you want to make sure you do it fairly evenly. As you can tell, it's very small but it says "DJ" there.