Eid Special Bridal Wedding Fashion 2014 Jewellery 03

Eid Special  Bridal Wedding Fashion 2014 Jewellery.

By Aamir Mannan.

"New tools and techniques bump you out of a rut and take you down a new road or spark a new series." Eid's latest toy is the MicroFold Brake, which corrugates metal. Soft metal sheet is fed into it and corrugated metal with interesting new textures comes out the other side. Cross-corrugation and crimping the metal folds are just two of the many possibilities available. "What especially excites me is combining the corrugated metal with the deep draw tools in the hydraulic press. Another plus to corrugation is that it adds tremendous structural strength to thin metal. This allowed me to make the Bee Lines earrings, which are four inches long yet made using 28-gauge metal. Strong, yet light and comfortable."

As every jeweler interested in record-keeping and self-promotion knows, once the piece is made, it should be photographed. "I learned how to photograph my work back in school," Eid says, "but it has taken years to master photographing jewelry." Recently, she wrote a handout on the subject that she gives out at her workshops.

Even though she is booked with commissions into 2004, Eid couldn't resist teaching a two-day class this past February at Rio Grande's Catalog in Motion show in Tucson, especially when it was on making bracelets using her favorite tools, the hydraulic press and the MicroFold Brake.

"After spending time soldering to make bangles, and dealing with the frustrations of making the seams strong enough for forming, yet elegant enough for a finished bracelet, it was fun to introduce folks to the joy of deep-drawing a six-inch disc to make seamless bangle-size tubing."

For Eid, each day begins in her studio with a round of mettle meeting metal, in which sheer physical strength, abetted by tools and reinforced by technique, force metal out of its linear shape into jewelry resembling garden roots and undulating sea

life washed up at the water's edge. Good jewelry elicits praise but successful jewelry, like Eid's, elicits an emotional response -- wonder. As Emily Dickinson put it: