| Welcome to Robert Cutler's Excellence in Fine Woodworking |
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| About my Silver Beads I have always like the appearance of Black Hills gold, which has shades of pink, gold, white, green and rose. The colors in Black Hills gold are derived from alloys using copper, silver,and gold and other trace metals. Mixing silver with gold gets shades lighter and lighter until finally you get white gold. Copper creates shades ranging from rose through pink. I have Alaskan gold nuggets on hand from my days of doing gold jewelry work for my gallery in Alaska. I thought it would be fun to melt gold nuggets of 21+k, add silver and some copper. It is only my judgment after forming these beads what the karat is. They run between 6 and 14k., depending on the color I try to achieve. Thats the art, as there is no exact science to it. The science would be to weigh every piece of known values of the metals and do the math to come up with the exact karat value. Art is about looks, karats are about the math. I chose to make beads this way because my signature works all have these colors of metal in them. Do to the precious nature of my silver work I couldn't just use copper and brass, so I use gold in keeping with the theme of precious jewelry. |