JETs on the Move: Jennifer Smith-Righter at The Revere Academy of Jewelry Art

Our very own Jennifer Smith-Righter of WearableByDesign is a magnificently talented jewelry artist. Back in June, Jennifer was honored with an Honorable Mention Award in the 2010 Silver Accessories Contest in Tokyo, Japan. Her winning necklace, Equilibrio , was the only US entry to win an award out of 647 worldwide submissions in this year’s competition. The piece was held on display at the National Art Center, Tokyo from June 23 – July 5, 2010. Recently, Jenn took a course geared toward perfecting techniques for the professional jeweler. The course Jenn took was the Jewelry Technician Intensive course at the Revere Academy . It was a total of 320 hours of instruction and lab time. The classes were 8 weeks, 5 days a week, where they learned the basics of the jewelry trade. The courses were broken down into the following components with materials to learn and to practice with: Casting Fabrication 1: Beginning Fab 2: Chains & Carving Fab 3: Construction Polishing & Finishing Repair 1: Basic Repair 2: Intermediate Setting 1: Basic Setting 2: Prongs Setting 3: Beads & Pave Trade Practices The sessions were split up into morning and afternoon sessions. Students were taught mainly by Alan Revere himself as well as Vaskin Tanielian and occasional instruction in other subjects by various members of the staff. It was very cleverly crafted so that each new subject taught built directly upon the previous project and felt very natural. The largest and most time consuming project they did was a box ring. This was one of the few projects where students were able to incorporate their own design. The project was to create a box ring and to decorate it using a sheet of roughly 1 inch square 14 k gold. They were to use less than 8 hours total time spent and could incorporate any other components or processes that they felt comfortable with. You can see the entire class' finished rings here. "My box ring was not the most creative ring -- there were several who were far more creative, but I was in a very serious frame of mind and wanted to focus on doing the task at hand rather than being a clever designer. I figured I could do that when I had my solid foundation of principles to draw from (insert giggle here!). "~Jennifer Smith-Righter

"So now, I'm eager to use my newly minted skills to create designs that incorporate gold and gems in ways I was unable to accomplish before. If anyone is even considering taking this course, I cannot recommend it highly enough!"~ Jennifer Smith-Righter

Congrats Jenn on your award and on completing such a rigorous course! You are an inspiration to the whole team!