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How the Jewelry is Made

The Creation of Got All Your Marbles? Interchangeable Jewelry

Lisa Stotska and William Skiles, Artists

Lisa Stotska

Artist Lisa Stotska was born in Washington, DC in 1956. She studied Advertising at the University of Maryland, then Graphic and Packaging Design at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

For years she worked for other graphic design firms, doing Mattel Barbie doll packaging and Toyota Motorboat engine graphics while living in LA. In 1986 she moved to Tucson and developed her own clientele, creating countless logo designs and catalogs for other companies.

Around this same time, she started drawing and painting as a way to balance her desire to channel her creative talent into her own passions instead of working for other people. Her artwork began at first with chalk pastel, and has developed over the years into mixed media work including oil stick, acrylic, Prisma colored pencils and sometimes even collage.

She has a passion for color, feeling she has an innate understanding of it and of the importance of having no fear when it comes to color. Sometimes her artwork is realistic, but always with a definite flair for color. Sometimes the work is more abstract, of an internal or feeling nature; turmoil; beauty; grace, always expressed with motion and color. She looks forward to spending more time working on her art in the future, as Got All Your Marbles? becomes more independent, requiring less of her time.

William A. Skiles

Jeweler & sculptor William A. Skiles was born in Houghton, Michigan in 1951. He is a self-taught artist and has worked as a jeweler since 1967. His forte is wax carving, creating fabulous tiny things initially out of wax. Using the lost wax process, the wax original is cast, and becomes whichever metal is chosen. William has chosen the medium of metal as a finished product because of the permanence of the material.

William spent years being an on-staff goldsmith at a local gold and diamond jewelry store. Around 1998, he and his wife became committed to figuring out how to earn a living themselves.

He initially started out by selling jewelry, being a relatively easy product to earn a living with. As the years have gone by, and as Got All Your Marbles? has taken off, he is now working larger and larger, creating sculptures that are not just jewelry anymore.

He loves to tinker, to take something apart and put it together to help him understand how it works and how to improve it. It also gives him new ideas. To illustrate his love of tinkering: When he bought a home in 1996, he had 11 cars and a tow truck which had to be housed on the property. From early on he saw cars as sculptures. He enjoys finding a good buy, improving it and then turning it around for a profit. He has always had the ability to see the potential in everything.

How the Jewelry is Made

William hand fabricates the original of each piece using wire and/or sterling silver sheet. For instance, the key chain was originally hand built using wire, but most of the styles of the jewelry were originally hand fabricated using both sterling silver sheet and wire.

Once the original design is approved it is put into production. First, William makes a rubber mold of each of the parts. The process of creating the molds is an art form in itself. Each mold is made by hand using sheets of silicon. He takes the metal item and wraps it with silicon one sheet at a time, building a thick mold around the metal piece. He puts it into a mold frame where it sets as it is cooked at a low temperature for a short time. After allowing it to cool, he very delicately cuts it apart to reveal the metal object. The negative space left when the object is removed is a perfect mold for the original metal piece. At this point William passes the mold onto one of the other jewelers.

The silicon mold is injected with hot wax from a wax pot. The wax comes out of a tube and is pushed into the rubber mold. Once the wax has cooled, the mold is opened to reveal a wax replica of the original metal piece. Several wax replicas will be made and added to a wax tree. The pieces are carefully attached to the branches of wax, which converge in a common trunk. The wax tree is inserted into a cylindrical flask, which is filled with a cementing mixture called investment. A vacuum is used to insure there are no bubbles in the investment. Once the investment has gone off and hardened, it is put into the oven and the wax is burned out leaving a negative of it's form in the hardened investment.

The flask is kept in the oven until we are ready to cast. The metal is heated in a crucible with a torch until it is red hot and melts. It is poured into the flask through the trunk of what was the wax tree (upside down) before it evaporated. A vacuum system is used again to insure there are no bubbles in the metal. The flask is then dipped into a bucket of water. The investment loosens and settles to the bottom of the bucket of water. What is left is what was the wax tree and is now a metal tree of whatever metal was cast. The metal is allowed to cool. The pieces are then clipped off the metal tree and rough ground to get the sharp parts off. They are then put through a series of tumblers that achieve the polishing process.

In the case of the pendants and earrings, the parts are tumbled for a bit and then picked out, cleaned and and assembled with soldering. Then they go back into the tumblers for a final polish. The last stage of the tumblers is a fine walnut shell medium with jewelers buffing rouge added to help achieve the high polish our pieces have by the time they get to the customer.

Note: Even the hook and eye on our snake chain and leathers were created this way! Then William has built a machine that one person operates to crimp the hook and eye on the ends.

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