I spent every waking hour that I didn’t have scheduled for goldsmith work practicing with my new tools.
I didn’t set any stones, just cut what felt like a thousand circles and other shapes and struggled through sharpening my own gravers. When I finally started early in April I had put in a little over 250 hours of deliberate practice.
the skills to set stones, they could test me out and see if I was up to par with their other local setters, some were a bit less enthusiastic and gave me the unsolicited advice that I didn’t need all that fancy equipment or training and could and should learn it the “proper way”, by buying a couple hand push gravers, a shellac stick, and some practice stones. I truly appreciate advice from veteran bench jewelers, but in this instance I’m very happy I didn’t take it to heart and went to Antwerp anyway. The test week went well and like the plan I went home, built myself a bench, bought a compressor and spent every waking hour that I didn’t have scheduled for goldsmith work practicing with my new tools. I went through a ton of the practice plates and two trips back to the school to discuss my progress. I didn’t set any stones, just cut what felt like a thousand circles and other shapes and struggled through sharpening my own gravers. When I finally started early in April I had put in a little over 250 hours of deliberate practice (yes, I’m the type of person who tracks that stuff). Probably some of the biggest return on investment hours I’ve spent in hindsight. The course itself was absolutely great. We worked pretty much 7 days a week and I loved every second of it. Around half way through the course I started to notice it took Alexandre longer and longer to figure
out what I should tackle next as a practice project. Because of all the practice at home I went fairly quickly through the ‘normal’ program. This was when the real fun began and we started to work on some bigger projects together. Please describe your work history/ experience since you began metalworking. While still a student in Antwerp, around month 2, the main stone setter of Alexander went for a couple of weeks back to his home country for summer holidays. This was when Alexander asked me if I was interested in doing ‘real’ stone setting work for him. There was a pretty big job coming in that was fairly basic, but a lot of pavé work. Not something he fancied doing himself and one that couldn’t wait until his stone setter was back again. To me this sounded like a brilliant opportunity. Learning and working with real jewelry and stones while being compensated in a small way, plus being able to say afterwards that I worked for real with the great Alexander himself! Somewhere during these weeks there was a group of Dutch goldsmiths, who were part of a Dutch jewelry guild, who came for a visit to Antwerp and stopped by at the school. Quickly they figured
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