Each Wednesday night from 6:45 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. we offer a club workshop night, where we teach everything from Cabochon Cutting, to Stone Setting, to Basic Jewelry Making, Faceting, Soldering, Beading, and more.  Click on any photo below for a high resolution image...Note, if you have a dialup internet connection, these images may take a while to download completely. All workshops are held in the wood workshop (Westervelt Hall, northern-most entrance) of the Rochester School for the Deaf, 1545 St. Paul Street, Rochester, New York.

We originally started with just Cabochon cutting on Wednesday nights, but over the past few years it has evolved due to our members wanting to learn more.  Initially we created another workshop night to learn all of these other trades, however it got to be too much for members to take more time away from their busy schedules to come in on a different night. So we bundled all this all into our single workshop night.  Cabochon cutting can be anything from a stone to set in jewelry to making domed stones to fit just about any application.  At the bottom of this page is a picture of some knife handles that I made out of Strawberry Ocean Jasper. 

Depending on the interest of club members, we will be teaching a class on how to create your own custom sterling-silver loop-in-loop chain.  These are fun to make and teach you a lot about soldering and finishing your jewelry.  I learned to make these a few years ago and have made and sold several.  We start you off making Silver chains because the material is cheaper, however if you want to get more professional and make something that is more valuable, then you can go with Gold.  The chain shown in the picture here is called a 2-way double loop-in-loop chain.  We will probably start with just a plain single loop-in-loop or a double loop-in-loop chain.  The final length of this chain was about 26" and contains approximately 300 loops.

We are also offering classes in Faceting.  The club currently owns several faceting machines we use to teach this skill.  Also, some members own faceting machines and bring their machines to learn how to use them. The club machines were made by Graves, and there are a lot of members who own machines by UltraTec, Raytech, Facetron, Lee, Covington, and home-made.  Each machine manufacturer has different locations and styles for their parts. 

And lastly, along the lines of chain making, we are teaching members how to solder jewelry.  One of our current projects was stone setting (pictures are available in the Photo Gallery.  We had a jeweler come in and show us how to set stones in settings, bezels, and tubes...for tube settings.  We also have an interest in learning flush setting and channel setting, and are in the process of setting up another work day for that too.  Sometimes these activities are also held during the Saturday carving workshops.  Here is a picture of a few members preparing our stone setting blocks.  We soldered a silver setting to a block of copper so we could have something to hold on to while setting a 3mm stone.