Special Commissions for Special Occasions; designing accessories for a major milestone.

  We were approached by a client who wanted us to design a range of accessories specifically for his upcoming wedding celebrations.  The wedding theme was birds and for the groom and his key groomsmen, the blue tit.  Following initial brainstorming sessions, it was decided that we would design and manufacture both cufflinks and lapel pins to create a running theme across the groomsmen’s accessories.

  Having been given the blue tit as the starting point for the project, the first step was to gain a better understanding of what makes this bird unique by collecting reference materials and photographs.  From these materials it became apparent that colour would be key to differentiating the bird as a blue tit, so the final design would need to be deep enough to hold enamel.

With a chosen image to work from, we began sketching to develop ideas for the design.  We decided to include the branch that the bird is standing on to break up the outer enamel ring and provide interest to the silhouette.  This was built upon by applying cut outs between the bird itself and the outer rim, helping to create focus on the blue tit body shape, while retaining a platform for either a cufflink fitting or butterfly pin fitting.   A slight border was added around the body of the bird to allow enamel to be applied to capture the unique feather colour scheme. 

With the design finalised in sketch format, we moved onto converting the sketches into CAD 3D models.  Vector lines were drawn around the key elements which make up the bird and these vectors were then filled with various greyscale tones to delineate heights.  Under this system pure white is used for the highest detail and pure black for the lowest detail.  The greyscale file was used to create an alpha for use in a 3D sculpting CAD program.  As previously mentioned, the alpha provides height information to enable the bird design to be modelled quickly.  With the relief generated, sophisticated modelling tools were used to cut into the bird relief to provide more feather detail.

The completed relief model was used to generate media to help the client to understand exactly what the finished product would look like, with specialist rendering software used to create sophisticated renderings and animations.  This ensured that the client was happy with the design and willing to commit to the creation of dies.

  The completed relief model was used to produce toolpaths which the CNC machinery followed to cut dies.  Once the dies were cut and hardened, they were positioned within the collars of the stamping presses of our onsite stamping facility.  Our skilled technicians found the ideal settings in terms of tonnage and stroke repetition to create detailed reliefs.  When the reliefs had been stamped, our traditional jeweller soldered the required fittings to the reverse of the design, in this case either butterfly pin fittings for lapel badges or whale tail swivel fittings for cufflinks.  The completed badges and cufflinks were then plated in the finish agreed with the client.  The plated reliefs were handed to enamel technicians who followed the rendered images closely to recreate the blue tit design.  The colours were pantone matched to ensure accuracy.

  In summary, our jewellery solution addressed the client’s need for unique and compelling jewellery accessories.  The final product was warmly received by the client and the bespoke blue tit bird jewellery was not only a hit on the wedding day itself, but also became a treasured heirloom providing memories over the passing years.  If you have a special occasion coming up that you would like to mark in the same way, please get in touch.