Natalie Vincent took  part in an intensive jewellery-making course…

Course: Begin at the Bench
Venue: Holt’s Academy of Jewellery

This machine here cleans your jewellery after polishing,’ explained our tutor, Stuart. ‘Mind you don’t put your fingers in there when it’s on, otherwise it will cook them from the inside out.’ Everybody looked at the ultrasonic cleaner and edged backwards slightly. I was at Holt’s Academy of Jewellery in Hatton Garden for Begin at the Bench –  an intensive three-day jewellery course designed to teach jewellery-making.

Our seven-strong class was a surprisingly varied mix of people, and ages ranged from 17 to 60. Some had serious ambitions to become jewellery designers, and others were simply there to learn a new hobby.

Double 0 design
Stuart Paul, our tutor, is a jewellery designer of more than 25 years experience. He was responsible for making Eva Green’s intricate Algerian love-knot necklace, which featured prominently in the Bond film Casino Royale. Stuart zipped around the class non-stop, regularly evicting us from our bench seats and showing us new skills such as how to saw.

Our first task was for each of us to create our own ring. We had to solder strips of silver into the ring shape using a blowtorch, which a lot of us were less than enthused about! We were then allowed to create our own designs for the outer box. I chose to make mine into a hollow cat-shape using the same blowtorching and sawing skills. By the end of the day we were all aching and covered in silver dust, but we had somehow managed to solder the rings together and started on the polishing. This involved laborious hand-filing and sanding using the evil-looking pendent drill.

Feeling creative
On day two we finished our rings and started on some pendants. I decided on a phoenix shape, which I almost instantly regretted when I had to request Stuart’s help with the dreaded sawing. ‘The courses at Holts were designed primarily for jewellers, but we set this one up to bring more people into the trade’, he grinned, while helping me to change yet another saw blade.
We spent our final day feverishly racing to get our pendants to the polishing stage – I found that by then I could actually get on with minimum help from Stuart.

Student feedback
Caron Power, who was sitting next to me working on a hammered silver heart, is an online jewellery seller who now wants to create her own pieces. So what did she think of the course? ‘I would actually recommend doing this as you get really good results really quickly’, she explained.

Finally done, we were all feeling smug at having created our own wearable jewellery. At £445 the course is quite a steep investment just for a hobby and is perhaps best for those who are really serious about jewellery-making. On the other hand, even if afterwards you don’t decide to become the next Theo Fennell, at least when you walk past a jeweller’s window, you’ll appreciate the frustration and hard toil that went into making the pieces inside. I should know.