The Pear Twist

Priya already owned a pear-shaped stone her grandmother had left her. She wanted us to set it into a twist band that would look deliberate, not trendy. We designed a soft two-strand shank that meets under the stone, so the pear appears to float. Matching her family stone to a clean white gold setting took three bench sessions to get the prongs invisible. This is the kind of repair-and-reimagine job we love.

Her stone measured 8x5.5mm on our gauge, a shade shallow for its spread. A shallow pear has a big table and a thin girdle, and a thin girdle is the one thing you cannot fix. We built the mount around that number rather than around the parcel label. The two strands of the shank are hand-carved in wax at 2.1mm and 1.6mm, crossing at the base and meeting under the stone at 11 o'clock so the pear tilts 4 degrees toward the wearer.

The setting is where the job got hard. Priya wanted no visible metal on the face, so the prongs have to live on the sides. I cut a 0.7mm seat into the basket, brought two round prongs over the shoulders and one wide flat prong at the point, then filed all three into 14k white gold until they disappeared into the outline of the stone from the top.

Honest part: I chipped the point on the first attempt. A nick about 0.2mm, and on a family stone there is no version of that which is fine. We stopped, sent her the photo the same afternoon, and she told us to keep going. I re-cut the seat 0.15mm deeper so the point sat in metal instead of hanging over it, then polished the nick out on a fine lap over forty minutes. You cannot find it now. I still think about it.

The first wax of the shank also failed in burnout and came out of the flask rough, so we cut a new one before casting. Unusual for us, and it cost two days. 4 weeks.