OK, so we’ve covered the situations where you might have to mass produce your jewelry. So how do you make it go along faster? Well, one of the best general methods we’ve found is to divide your jewelry making process into smaller tasks, and perform that task on all the items at once. Have a look at the following pic:
This is actually the in-progress production of a whole mass of earrings for a previous show we did recently. Now, the idea is not to turn yourself into an assembly line … well, it sort of is. What you want to do is reduce the number of times you pick up a particular tool or perform a certain function. Instead of making one pair of earrings from start to finish, you create all the earrings up to a certain step. This can speed along the process of making a large quantity of items.
In the above pic, I’ve taken all these pearl earrings components just right up to before they need to be wire-wrapped to form a nice loop so they can be hung on a jump ring. The reason I did this is the next step requires me to change tools - I need two chain nose pliers to do the wire-wrapping. If I finished one whole earring at a time, I’d have to continually: pick up my chain nose pliers to create a headpin, put a pearl on, then pick up the rosary pliers to form a loop, then the flush-cut pliers to cut the wire, then the two chain nose pliers to wirewrap the loop.
By compartmentalizing the process, it can go quite a bit faster. And repeating tasks, you get into the rhythm of making jewelry, making each individual task go faster.
This method is not without it’s drawbacks. For one - it can get supremely BORING. There’s still nothing like the satisfaction of creating a piece of jewelry from start to finish. Doing them all at once in mini-steps can become a drag - just try and do that for 50 earrings!
Anyway, this article isn’t supposed to be a cure for the mass-produced jewelry making blues. But, hopefully this simple guideline will help make the going a bit faster when you need to make more than one item.
