CONGRATULATIONS!

Well done to Sally who was Monday's winner, Nathalie our winner on Tuesday and Bron - Wednesday's girl. One of our brand new designs will be making its way to each of you very soon!

New Limited Edition Bangles

We have been able to get our hands on five of these lovely chunky Gold Vermeil Sterling Silver handmade bangles, we are rather pleased with them and we wanted to give you a first look! They are going to be £350 each and as there are only five and we can't get any more, just email customercare@zigzagjewels.com if you would like to reserve one of the beauties.

From Design to Finished Piece

We thought you would like to see one of our talented designers in action, so here is a series showing a design from initial idea to a finished piece.

Here is the man in action; drawing book, bits of silver, tools and a lot of imagination result in a beautiful new earring design.

so off to the workshop where component parts are soldered together

cleaned up and polished

stones can be set

the silver earrings are stripped, dipped and plated

then we get to have a look.

the only problem is they are so lovely we want them all for ourselves!

Win New Jewels

We would really like to hear from you, get some feedback on new ideas, jewellery, our pictures, and find out from you what you want to see. So...every day his week we will be giving away a piece of jewellery from our brand new selection (before it hits our shops) for our favorite comment.

Just click on 'comments' below any picture and drop us a line.

A Trip Around City Palace

We had a day of exploring the city, this is City Palace. The two flags you can see flying at the top of the picture originate from Raja Jai Singh II. He was given the title of "Sawai" meaning "The One-and-a-Quarter" by Emperor Aurangzeb for his above average intelligence. Since then the rulers of Jaipur have flown two flags, one full and one quarter-sized to symbolize this title.

For anyone who has ever tried to raise a silver bowl...

This is one of a pair of silver urns at the City Palace, it was made from melting silver coins into a sheet and it took two men two years to form it, there are no solder joins they are just silver sheet hammered into shape. They were made to carry water from the Gangees 1902 when Maharaja Madho Singh II went to England for King Edward's coronation, he had them made so he could carry enough sacred Ganges water with him to bathe every day for four months! The urns measure five feet high and are considered to be the largest silver objects in the world

The Making Process

We went to see some of our makers' workshops today, we thought you might be interested to see how lovely and clean everything was, and the journey your jewellery goes through from pure silver to beautiful finished pieces.
so here is the casting process...


First a handmade master copy of the finished ring is used to make a latex mould. The mould is filled with pink wax then the wax pieces are individually touched up by hand to make sure they are perfect.

The wax pieces are then set like little branches on wax tree and placed in a metal tube over which plaster is poured.

The wax is melted out in a kiln and the plaster gets completely dry and throughly hot. It is removed from the kiln then very quickly molten silver is poured into the hot mould.

The silver starts off as pure silver and an alloy is added so it is hard enough for jewellery. The alloy makes it 925 or Sterling Silver.

The trees come out of the plaster and the component jewellery parts are all ready to be snipped off, soldered together and polished up.

Then they go off to the highly skilled setters and with the beautiful gemstones all in place they get a final polish and are ready to go to new homes!