Gem Setting Course Day 5: Flush setting and the prep for grain setting

For a half-hour practice of flush setting at the start of the class, I finally made it! I only used ball burrs and a small burnisher made from an old beader. I burnished the surface of the metal around the inside edge of the flush setting until the stone didn’t move and looked neat and highlighted. You can still see where I messed up a couple of holes by enlarging them with ball and hart burs.:)

Flush settings I ve done.

Then we moved on to a new technique called ‘Grain setting.’ Before starting the course, I read through the book, The Guide to Gemstone Settings: Styles & Techniques by Anastasia Young. It was a pretty good book, and I could understand many terms used for stone setting, including methods and tools. According to the book, there are five different kinds of grain settings: Grain Setting, Five-grain Setting, Square-grain Setting, Pavé Setting, and Micro-pavé Setting.

From my understanding, the star shape setting seems similar to grain setting, except that instead of using a beader, we went straight into five-grain setting. This was divided into the 'Marking out' and 'Cutting out' processes.

Two process are explained

I was even struggling to prepare for this setting by drilling straight holes with ball burs. The metal we are practicing on is 3mm-thick copper square pieces cut by an improper guillotine. Anyway, I’ve got one more copper piece to make better holes prepared at home. The example below was done by Renee, of course. Even though the process is quite understandable, without practicing cutting lines and enlarging the holes incrementally, I wouldn’t be ready for next week’s class. It shows the process leading to the step where a flat graver is used

5 grain setting process