Most people have never seen a piece of jewelry being made. They see the finished necklace in a box, tissue-wrapped, beautiful — and the whole story of how it got there stays invisible. I want to change that.
Every FindingYoYo piece starts not with metal, not with a gemstone, but with a small block of wax and a carving tool. This post is about that process — and why I think it matters more than most people realize.
What is wax carving, exactly?
Wax carving (also called lost-wax casting or cire perdue) is one of the oldest metalworking techniques in human history. Artists and craftspeople have been using it for over 5,000 years — across ancient Egypt, pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, the bronze-casting traditions of China's Shang dynasty, and Renaissance Europe. When I first learned this, something clicked for me. The technique that shapes my contemporary pearl rings is the same one that shaped ceremonial jade ornaments thousands of years ago. That felt right for a brand built on ancient materials.
The basic principle is elegant in its simplicity: you carve a model in wax, encase it in plaster, burn the wax away (hence "lost wax"), and pour molten metal into the space left behind. The metal takes the exact shape the wax had. Then you finish the piece by hand.
Simple in concept. Demanding in practice.
Step 1: The sketch
Everything starts with drawing. Before I ever pick up a carving tool, I sketch the design — usually in a small notebook at my bench in Rhode Island. I'm thinking about proportion, about how the piece will sit on a body, about how light will catch it. I'm also thinking about what feeling I want the piece to carry.
A lot of my designs come from European classical paintings — the soft weight of a pearl in a Dutch Golden Age portrait, the curve of a collar in a Flemish oil. Others come from natural forms: a seed pod, a water droplet, the way jade looks when it's still rough. The sketch is where I let those references speak without overthinking them.
Step 2: Carving the wax model
This is the part most people find surprising. I work with jeweler's wax — a firm, slightly waxy material that carves and sands cleanly. Using files, gravers, and small blades, I remove material slowly, shaping the design by hand.
It is slow. A single ring model can take two to four hours. A pendant with layered texture longer. There's no undo button. Every cut is a decision.
What wax carving gives you that other techniques don't is resolution — the ability to capture very fine detail, organic curves, and subtle surface texture that would be nearly impossible to achieve through fabrication alone. When I carve the petal edge of a floral ring or the soft rounded belly of a pendant, I'm working at a scale closer to sculpture than assembly.
Step 3: Casting in Rhode Island
Once the wax model is finished, I bring it to a third-generation casting studio right here in Rhode Island — a family-run operation that's been doing this work for decades. Rhode Island has one of the richest jewelry manufacturing histories in the United States; for over a century, the state was the center of American jewelry production, and that craft tradition still lives here.
At the casting studio, the wax model is attached to a wax "tree" — a central rod with multiple models branching off it — and placed inside a steel flask. The flask is filled with investment plaster and left to set overnight. Then it goes into a kiln. The wax melts and burns away entirely, leaving a perfect negative space in the hardened plaster.
Molten sterling silver (or gold alloy, depending on the design) is then spun into the flask under centrifugal force, filling every cavity. When the plaster is broken apart, the metal casting is revealed — raw, rough-edged, but already recognizably the shape I carved.
Step 4: Hand finishing
Casting is not the end. It's actually where the most intimate work begins.
Each piece comes back to my bench and is finished entirely by hand. I use files, sandpaper, burnishers, and polishing tools to remove any casting seams, refine edges, and build the final surface texture. For pieces with a high-polish finish, this process alone can take as long as the original carving. For matte or hammered surfaces, I add texture deliberately at this stage.
Then comes setting stones — freshwater pearls, jade, natural gemstones — each seated and secured by hand. Pearls in particular require patience. They're organic, not perfectly uniform, and each one has to be matched to the setting it was made for.
Why does any of this matter?
When you buy a mass-produced piece of jewelry, you're buying something made at scale with efficiency as the primary goal. There's nothing wrong with that. But the piece has no specific author. No hand knew it by name.
When you wear a FindingYoYo piece, you're wearing something that passed through my hands at every stage — from the wax model I carved at my bench to the pearl I selected and set. I know that specific piece. I made decisions about it.
That's what handmade actually means. Not just "assembled by a human" but authored — shaped by attention, intention, and a process that's been refined over thousands of years of human making.
That's the kind of jewelry I want to put into the world.
FindingYoYo is a contemporary semi-fine jewelry brand handcrafted in Rhode Island, using freshwater pearls, jade, and natural gemstones set in 925 sterling silver and gold vermeil. If you'd like to see the process up close, follow along on Instagram or join one of our wax carving workshops.
