The Art of Jewelry

Each day we read about bailouts for the banking and automotive industry. However, there are other industries that need help. The jewelry industry is down and it's affecting thousands of professionals.

We've asked some of the top jewelers in the U.S. to share their thoughts.

Jewelry To Adore

Where you can select from a collection of Sterling Silver and Fine Pearl Jewelry. Our Sterling Silver Jewelry is .925 Sterling Silver or above. Our Fine Pearl Jewelry is finished with 14K or 18K white or yellow gold.

Both our Silver Jewelry and our Pearl Jewelry are shipped in their own jewelry box or pouch, great for gift giving and for storing your jewelry.

Here at Jewelry To Adore our mantra is "we are big enough to cope, but small enough to care!"

www.jewelrytoadore.com

Coventry Cottage Crystal has been in business for about 15 years. We specialize in the design and manufacturing of crystal jewelry using only the finest Swarovski Austrian Crystal beads. All of our jewelry is designed and manufactured in the USA.

Coventry Cottage Crystal specializes in wedding jewelry designs with our one on one customer service relationship with each of our clients. We pride ourselves in our ability to create that special design that will compliment the attire of everyone in your wedding party including the bride, bridesmaids, flower girls, and the mothers of the bride and groom.

Michael Smith www.coventrycrystaljewelry.com

Our WigJig company is slightly different from most companies selling jewelry tools. The people who run our company actually make jewelry. Our company was founded by a combination of Marge Helwig and her son, Gary Helwig. Working together they developed the WigJig family of jewelry making tools and accessories. Most of the companies making jewelry tools are experts in making tools but not in making jewelry. They know how to make pliers so they just make a slightly different pair of pliers for the jewelry application. Unfortunately, the result is pliers that work and are well made, but aren't really optimized for making jewelry. This wasn't good enough for us.

The reason we invented our WigJig jewelry making tools is because we wanted to use these tools for making our own jewelry. We have also worked with vendors to develop some new hand tools, that we now sell, for the simple reason that we found that the then existing pliers did not meet the needs for our approach to making jewelry. If you review our Beginner's Instructions you will see that we have methods for accomplishing several jewelry making techniques that aren't used or taught by others in this industry. In short we do things differently because we think we found a better way to do many of the basic tasks involved in making jewelry by hand with no soldering. Our goal is simple. We want to make jewelry by hand that is so consistent that it looks like it was made by a machine.

Gary Helwig www.wigjig.com