Leah Ashley Jewelry Designs Creates Stunning Custom Jewelry » Australian Opal http://www.leahashley.com Stunning Custom Jewelry Designed Just For You Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:51:20 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Palladium, the other white metal http://www.leahashley.com/news/palladium-the-other-white-metal/ http://www.leahashley.com/news/palladium-the-other-white-metal/#comments Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:16:18 +0000 Leah Ashley http://www.leahashleydesigns.com/?p=239 This is a design I did for a recent customer.  Australian Opal Palladium DesignThis guy came to me with an opal that he had gotten in Australia that he wanted to mount in either a ring or a pendant for his wife.  He really wanted the piece made out of platinum because he had always bought his wife platinum pieces before.  The problem was that he had a pretty low price that he wanted to hit and platinum is SUPER expensive right now.  I suggested using palladium instead of platinum. It looks like platinum in that it is a white metal, and it is actually in the platinum metal family, but it is a fraction of the price.

He wasn’t really sure about using a different metal but he trusted my advice and decided to give it a try.  The piece I designed for him was super simple without a lot of embellishment in order to keep labor costs down but it really highlighted his stone.  I used heavy prongs to give the piece a little added style and since we were using palladium the added weight wasn’t a big added cost.

I think the piece turned out really well and he was very happy when he picked it up.Finished Australian Opal Palladium Pendant

He did insist on a platinum chain.

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