an awesome metal welder and pursue a career in underwater welding, join the army (thanks to a childhood fan boy obsession with Rambo, Arnold and the like), or to become the best carpenter in town. So as a fourteen-year old I checked the school out. When I saw the goldsmith classrooms fully equipped with cool looking work benches, students who were slugging along personal tool boxes with intricate tools and the sounds of polishing machines, hammer blows and the faint smell of fire in the background I had two thoughts running through my head. First one, sign me up! Second one, when do we start! How did you learn this set of skills? What training have you pursued? I started the aforementioned bench jeweler school when I turned 16 and went through the 4-year full time program. This started out with 2 years in school with a variety of subjects like art history, gemology training, drawing, sculpting and Thursdays and Fridays behind the bench. The last two years were both divided in half. 50% was spent interning at a jeweler company and the other half in school. During the time in school I had to write a business plan and during the last internship period (at a different company) I had to design and make a ‘masterpiece’ that showed my level of proficiency in all the aspects that are important to a bench jeweler. When I was 20, with my diploma in my pocket, both companies where I had done my training asked me to work for them on a part-time basis. My uncle mentioned it was fairly easy to start and register my own business entity in order to work for them both as an independent contractor, and how that could be a benefit for them as well as for me. During these first months I worked around 5 days a week with these companies and took on any other jewelry jobs that came my way (both ‘bosses’ were a bit older and happy to drop my name when they had other jewelers knocking on their door to do extra work), invested in quite a nice workshop where I was spending many hours around those 5 days and building up a solid reputation as someone who can get the job done in a good way and on time. I learned a lot during those months but the one thing I had to outsource were stone setting jobs.
I had dabbled a bit in stone setting and hand engraving while still in school as extra subjects and truly had a great time doing that, so my plan back then was to, after finishing up school, to get proper training in this at a specialized school or training facility. I ended up going to New Approach School For Jewelers in Franklin Tennessee to follow two weeks of stone setting classes with Blaine Lewis. This was a great experience in and of it itself, but probably the best thing was that he recommended to me to check out Alexandre School in Belgium. (My initial Google search wasn’t all too good when I initially looked for stone setting schools, I totally missed Alexandre School). So pretty much straight after returning from America I visited Antwerp and talked to Alexandre and the secretary at the school to learn more about the course options. I was super fired up after this visit and in my head totally ready to start the 3-month course. I definitely caught the stone setting bug at this point and didn’t want to do anything less than the longest and biggest course available. But having mentally decided that turned out to be the easy part. Getting actually started with the course came with some minor challenges to figure out first. Mainly I had to save up enough money to cover the course, tools, apartment and normal living expenses, plus enough to cover the 3-month period without any income. So back to my workshop in Holland I went to put in a ton of work and get myself ready for January 2013, when I had the test week with Alexandre. This all went according to plan so one Sunday evening I found myself in an Antwerp hotel across the school pretty nervous but super excited to start the next day. On my first trip to the school I discussed with the secretary if it was possible for me, if, after finishing and passing the test week, to buy all the tools and go home to practice with them for a couple of months before starting the ‘real’ course. This happened to work perfectly with their student schedule so they were okay with that. This had multiple benefits for me. Some of which were that now I had plenty of time to arrange a good place to stay during my time in Antwerp, to let my clients know upfront that I would be off in a couple of months for a pretty long time, (they had to find another bench jeweler in the meantime). Most were pretty excited for me and saw the benefit for them as well, when I would return afterwards with
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