I’m Lucie Fink.
I’m a video producer at Refinery29.
But every so often I like to try other people’s jobs.
Today I’m at the Brooklyn Navy Yard visiting Catbird, and I’m gonna learn how an engagement ring is made
and also see if I have what it takes to make my very own bridal jewelry.
This is Lucie For Hire.
I’ve been engaged for just about a year now, and with my wedding coming up in September,
I’ve become increasingly interested in bridal jewelry.
Catbird is the maker of those dainty little gold rings that I always wear,
and also of my favorite baby pearl hoop earrings.
And in a world filled with factories, assembly lines, and 3D printers, it’s amazing to
see artists that still make their craft by hand.
At Catbird’s jewelry studio in Brooklyn, New York, you’ll see a buzzing floor flooded
with natural light and filled mostly with young women all hammering, welding, and polishing
their way to beautiful hand-crafted pieces.
Naturally, the first thing that I took interest in was watching
an engagement ring in process from start to finish.
It all begins in their gold room.
On this day, the jeweler was making Catbird’s Violette The Swan ring.
The stones, which are recycled, brilliant cut white diamonds, are pulled from inventory,
and then the gold wire for the shank, which is one hundred percent recycled,
is formed on the mandrel and measured to be the perfect ring size.
Then in comes the casting, which is basically the head of the ring where the diamonds will sit.
The jeweler then measures the width of the casting so that she knows how much space to
leave in the shank, and then marks the shank and snips it accordingly.
The two pieces are then ready to be welded in the laser welder.
The jeweler carefully welds the two pieces together, and then the ring is prepared for stone setting.
A handheld rotary tool, called a flex shaft, is used to cut the seat for the stones
to sit flat in the setting.
The prongs are first pulled over the stone with pliers, and then tapped
over the stone with the hammer handpiece to keep the stone secure.
Throughout this process, I learned that if a stone isn’t set straight, it won’t reflect
the light to the best of its ability and it wouldn’t do the stone justice.
So Catbird’s jewelers work intently to make sure every aspect of the piece is perfect.
After the prongs are shaped and the stones are all set, the ring is polished, finished,
cleaned up, and sent through for quality assurance testing.
And after that, some lucky human gets to walk around for the rest of their
life with this beautiful handcrafted ring.
Okay, that’s my hand.
I was just trying it on.
Watching this entire process got me so inspired
that I knew that I wanted to try making a piece of my own.
Of course, I already have an engagement ring and also a wedding band picked out for my left hand.
But I thought it would be incredibly special to make a ring that I’d wear on my right
hand on my wedding day.
So I partnered up with Sasha, a jeweler at Catbird, who worked alongside me and taught
me to make their Snow Queen ring.
I came into this industry mostly by choice, but both of my parents are in the industry,
so it kind of just happened naturally.
I personally didn’t go to trade school, but I did have somewhat of an at-home trade school
experience through my parents.
My mom ran her business upstairs in our home, and we had a bunch in my house growing up.
So I kind of had my own trade school experience there.
I think Lucie’s gonna struggle a little, specifically with stone setting.
I think cutting the seat for the stone and also just having that
level of control with your hands is really important.
Just trying not to nick yourself, or laser weld your finger.
But yeah, other than that it’s gonna be a really fun experience,
and I also heard that she’ll be wearing the ring on her wedding day, which is really special.
And it’s definitely a fun process.
Your first challenge is prepping in the gold room.
Before starting any piece of jewelry, you have to go into their gold room for your raw materials.
Catbird uses recycled gold, and all of the brilliant cut diamonds in the Catbird collection are recycled,
meaning they’re reclaimed from vintage and dead stock jewelry,
so there’s no mining involved or any environmental impact.
The Snow Queen ring has a nice mix of recycled brilliant cut white diamonds and ethically
sourced rose cut white diamonds.
The shank of the snow queen ring was pre-cut in inventory, so we gathered the shank and
casting we needed, and then sorted through the diamonds to pull the right sizes for this ring.
We have all these diamonds here, what do I do with these?
So there’s the 1.7 millimeter brilliant.
And we need two of those.
Two of those.
And then we need four two millimeter rose cuts.
You have to be really good with your hands to work here.
For the center stone, we need one 3 millimeter rose cut.
Once I dropped my diamonds into a baggy and had my shank and casting ready,
it was off to my second challenge.
Diamonds.
Way to go.
In my bag!
Alright.
To the bench?
To the bench.
Your second challenge is the initial assembly.
Now it was time for me to stick my hands in the laser welding machine and weld the two pieces together.
Niiiccee!
This part was difficult.
So I should walk out of here with fingers.
With both hands, yeah.
We first added some black marker to the area of both pieces that we wanted fused together,
since adding darker color better attracts the laser.
Then you have to look through the microscope, which makes this tiny ring look huge.
Line up the region that you want to target on the little ‘X’,
and then step on a foot pedal to fire the laser.
Sasha demonstrated how to do it first, and she even showed me how hot the ring gets in there.
Oh my gosh!
It burns!
Then she let me have a try.
This is not as easy as it looks.
The toughest part for me was keeping my hands perfectly still and not moving my upper body
at all while I stepped on the foot pedal.
For some reason, I only see my own eyes.
I definitely missed a few times and accidentally fired the laser straight through to the floor of the machine.
Oh, I think I hit the wrong spot.
I’m lasering this ring.
Whoo!
Ha ha, my ring looks beautiful.
In this stage.
Right? Now it’s done.
My third challenge was stone setting.
Unlike the engagement ring which had one large diamond and then two smaller diamonds,
the Snow Queen ring has seven small diamonds.
So setting these stones is very precarious.
I began by opening up the prongs with pliers ever so slightly to make room for the diamonds.
And then use the flex shaft and setting bur to cut seats for the stones.
You then use a sticky piece of wax to pick up the diamonds and place them into the seat.
It’s important to place them with the right side up, and also not to drop them,
which I accidentally did.
They’re tiny, so you have to have a really good eye when it comes to finding them.
And thankfully Sasha does, so she found the stone that I dropped.
Once a diamond was straight and in place, she taught me how to tighten the prongs, use
the hammer handpiece to gently bend the prongs over the stone, and then shape the prongs
using the flex shaft with rubber abrasive wheels
in order to give the prongs their signature Catbird claw look.
After setting the stones, it was time for my final challenge: polishing and finishing.
We continued to shape and smooth the prongs with several different types of abrasive rubber wheels.
One abrasive, called a knife edge, to sharpen and shape the prongs,
and one light abrasive to take down the height of the prongs and to smooth them out
before we gave the entire ring a high polish on the giant polishing wheel.
Once it was polished, we dropped it in to an ultrasonic bath.
This bath emits high frequency soundwaves.
So when you place the jewelry into this cleaning solution, the bubbles created by the disturbance
in the water remove the dirt and contamination on the pieces.
I even put my own engagement ring into this ultrasonic bath just to give it some extra polish.
It’s a different ring.
And finally, we steamed the ring until it was shiny and perfect.
And after only a couple of hours, I had a beautiful finished
Snow Queen ring ready to go for my wedding day.
There’s something so special about handcrafted jewelry and watching all of the love that
goes into each and every piece, and I can’t believe that I got to make a piece of jewelry
that I’m gonna wear on my wedding day.
Seeing this studio in action is incredible.
So many talented women at work in such a fun environment.
Thanks for tuning in, and let us know what jobs you want to see me try next time on Lucie For Hire.
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