 If you watch Common Ground online, consider becoming a member or making a donation at lptv.org. Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people November 4th, 2008. Hi, I'm Adam Wegman, owner of WDesign's Jewelry. I'm a jewelry designer, goldsmith and silversmith, and today we're going to be making a moose antler. What I do to start a piece of jewelry is I design a sketch, so I come up with ideas based on things I see in nature, or even in metropolitan areas or whatever it may be. In our instance today, we're going to be doing a moose antler. So I did a sketch of a moose antler that I liked, and then I draw it out on a piece of wax, and then I use various tools to carve and shape the wax into what I think replicates realistic moose antler. I typically start out by roughing out the outline with a large burr and taking a lot of material fast. And then what I do is switch to smaller burrs to get in the more detailed areas. What inspires me to make jewelry is a person's heart. It's always a representation of something someone either went through or has enjoyed in their life or even a deep hurt and it's a remembrance of someone loved from the past or the present or a hope for the future. So a lot of the designs I make are based on those feelings and on a very personal level. I'm going to switch burrs and get a smaller one so I can get in between these areas for the moose antler that I'm creating. So right here I have a stock piece of wax. It's just the stock thickness. And I have to cut these small negative spaces in between the tines on the moose antler. And I need a small burr to get in between these little tines on the moose antler. And this is the one I have available but the cutting depth isn't deep enough to get through this. So I'm going to have to file the back of my moose antler off to make this piece thinner so my burr can cut all the way through the workpiece. And I need to do that eventually anyway so I'll just start it now. I'm going to mark a line so I don't go too far. I went to school to be a machinist so working with metal is what I've always loved to do. And I ended up working at a jewelry store and they started training me to do jewelry repair and some ring cleanings and inspections and things like that. And from there I just started developing a talent for setting stones and doing more fabrication and things like that. And we actually moved away from that city and so I decided just to go out on my own and start designing on my own. So my creative process is somewhat chaotic since my shop is in my home and my studio is in my home so I have a lot of interruptions with a growing family but that's the part that makes it interesting and unique. Some days I have a lot of creative juices flowing and I can come up with ideas and pieces and other days I am struggling. I stare at a piece, I may make a mistake or I might even just have to walk away for the day because it's just not happening. When I need to walk away from my jewelry bench to I guess decompress, I do cleaning jerks. So I lift some heavy weights to just get rid of the stress and that helps me a lot. As good as I can get it with the flux shaft with a burr so now I am going to switch to a file to finish it up and make all the details and clean everything up and make it look like a real mousse antler. One thing I like to tell people and that I have discovered this over my life so far is that in modern day times we are made to fit into a box. Everything fits in a box nice and neat and if you don't fit inside the box you are considered an outcast or kind of weird or whatever and I actually am trying to break that mold and I encourage people to think outside the box. Be weird, be yourself, express yourself in whatever way you think is necessary. I think God makes us all individuals and I don't think there is a one size fits all for anything and that includes jewelry. I am just rounding everything off with my file here. So I think it is a great way to express who you are and your personality and the differences between you and another person and to actually celebrate our differences instead of making them a source of conflict. Now I am going to switch to an exacto knife to get into the really tight spots that I can't get a file into. I get a sense of freedom from designing. I tend to step outside the box often in my life in general and jewelry I have noticed is for the most part it is very traditional and so I like to expand on the traditional and bring in elements that other people don't use a lot of times different finishes, abstract ideas, more asymmetrical designs versus everything being symmetrical. This file has a bunch of wax that is on it so I am going to clean it. This one I was using has a... it is rounded on both sides which works nice for rounding things. Now I need to get into a more of a straight place so this file has a straight edge. It is called a needle file. I am liking how this looks on the front but I noticed when I turn it over this section right here got thin so I am going to build it back up with a wax pen. I think when I was filing I had my file at an angle a little bit but that is okay, wax is forgiving we can add some more and file it back down so I will turn this on. This is my wax pen that I heat up and just wait a couple seconds and this will get hot and it is already melting wax so we just take some from here put it in my thin spot here so using the hand file I can get really detailed on the little nooks and crannies within my design and actually you could just use a file and create a wax design I choose to use some electrical methods just for time purposes it is a lot faster but a person can just use files and I could use files just to create the design and the files help round the design they make it more natural more flowing and just a representation of what you would see out in nature so this will eventually go into a flask and plaster will be poured in then it is heated in a kiln and the plaster hardens up the wax actually melts away and burns out and it leaves a cavity within the plaster of what the wax looks like so it is called the lost wax process and then it is going to be cast into silver I created one series called My Armor of God series which is Shield of Faith and other armaments that are talked about in Ephesians 6 in the Bible and it is a remembrance of the biblical verses that talk about our protection that we are protected and then another collection that I have is the Outdoor Adventure series which is kind of geared towards outdoors men and women there is antlers and arrowheads and arrow pieces this is an elk antler that I did for the same series and a white-tailed antler but one thing I do is I like my pieces to be the same on both sides so they are reversible so this will be reversible and these are as well this one is polished on one side then I have a dark finish with kind of a brushing on the other side so they are reversible they are able to be worn with different outfits and whatever you are feeling like if you want to have more flashy look you can wear it this way or subdued you can wear it with the dark inside out so our moose antler is pretty much finished I have some final details but I will do that later and the next step is to get it cast into silver which I don't do I send that out that is the only part of the jewelry process I don't do but I just wanted to show this to you because the next step will show you is a rough cast piece when I get it back you will see how it looks so here is a ring I just got back from being cast sterling silver it doesn't look like much now because it is a really matte finish and it comes out whitish looking like this and here is the sprue and the sprue is where the material was poured into the mold it is the shaft that the material comes through to get into the ring cavity and it is left on the back of the ring and I have to grind it off with my buffing unit next I will go over to my metal bench and I will use a sanding wheel and I will sand all the rough edges and then I will use a silicone wheel to get it further down and then I come back here with a buffing wheel on here and I will polish everything up but what I love about jewelry is it represents something deeper for people it is given to a loved one for an anniversary or upon the birth of a child or things like that and so it is always a representation of something with deeper meaning and it is one thing that people are getting on to throughout their lives it is handed down from generation to generation and I just think it has a lot of value because of that