Studio Visit with Erin Cuff

Originally recorded November 23, 2022.

George Irwin of Western Gallery visits with Erin Cuff, whose work centers on goldsmith / jewelry and who is based in Sonoma County, California, for a wide-ranging conversation about the artist’s work, process, and studio practice.

Transcript note: Speaker labels were assigned from the source audio where available and dialogue context otherwise. Paragraph breaks were added for readability, and verbal filler was lightly edited. Joint labels mark rapid or overlapping exchanges. This was prepared from an automated transcription, so minor transcription errors may remain.

Artist-narrated studio profile—November 23, 2022

Watch the original video on Instagram (03:33)

Participants: Erin Cuff

Erin Cuff: Hi, my name is Erin Cuff. I am a goldsmith and jewelry designer located in Northern California, Sonoma County, and this is the peak in my studio with Western Gallery. The materials I use in each piece All of the metals are either recycled or a fair mind and all of the white diamonds that you see in each piece are recycled. The only piece that has something a little bit different are the yucca earrings which have a pair of salt-and-pepper shield shaped rose cut diamonds that I've been holding on to for a while they look really incredible in person so I highly recommend checking out the high-res images of them. The pieces are extremely time intensive to make, they're all solid Argentium and Sterling Silver with high Carat 22 yellow gold for the most part with also some 14 and 18 carat mixed in and it's all sweat soldered and fused together which is a technique that has taken me literally years to perfect. They are not easy to make, but designing them and seeing how they turn out is so satisfying to me. I first started making this motif when I was living in San Miguel de In de Mexico in the state of Guanajuato which is a very high desert landscape in central Mexico about three hours from Mexico City. The second piece of jewelry I ever made had my Moonrise Motif and it was inspired by the desert landscapes that I was living in San Miguel as well as the desert landscape that I grew up in, in Southern California and traveling through the Mojave and Arizona, and Nevada, all those surrounding deserts.

Erin Cuff: My favorite part of the jewelry making process in these desert moonrise pieces is definitely the point when I finally get to dunk the piece in liver of sulfur which is an oxidizing agent. If you've ever been in a sulfur hot spring, sulfur cod spring, and your jewelry turns black, That's exactly what liver of sulfur does, but for me it's intentional. It gives the color of the metal this dark patina that transforms from me into a night sky. When I'm making the piece it's usually not oxidized until I am 90% done with the piece. So sometimes I'll have the piece on my bench for 20 hours working on it before I get to see what it actually looks like and it just totally transforms the piece and makes it pop and sing and give you that great feeling that you get when you see a piece and know that it's almost done.

Erin Cuff: ["The

Instagram Live studio visit—November 16, 2022

Watch the original video on Instagram (45:59)

Participants: George Irwin and Erin Cuff

George Irwin: Hello out there! I don't know if anybody's out there right now or not. We'll find out. It's been a long time, I feel like since I've done an Instagram live studio visit. Months at least so I'm excited about this today. I'm gonna be visiting with Erin Cuff who is a goldsmith silversmith jewelry artist in Northern California Yeah. And her body of work, um, desert moonrise, like her, I guess it's more than a body of work. It's sort of an ongoing motif that she's been working with. Um, we're featuring uh, an exclusive bunch of one-of-a-kind pieces in Western Gallery's Impermanent Collection right now. Uh, so if you haven't seen those go take a look at western.gallery and check out these really amazing pieces of jewelry that Erin has made for Western Gallery. And let's see if I can get her on here now we're gonna visit her in her

George Irwin: studio out in Sonoma County, I believe. And I just pushed a button I don't know maybe she invited me. Let's see except there we go. Hey Erin! How are you doing? Good how are you doing good I like your glasses I was noticing those from the photo thank you thank are they are they like regular glasses that you wear all the time or they like stylish eye protection or both they're they're both cool what do you got going on over there? Hello. What's going on

Erin Cuff: over there today? Today I am working in the studio which I do most days of the week, and I'm preparing for the holiday crunch as we like to call it in in the jewelry world, which usually is from like October to the end of December. Yeah I don't have a storefront or retail space or anything so I do a handful of shows every year and one of them is this weekend so I'm just kind of preparing for that and yeah stayin' warm.

George Irwin: Cool, cool yeah. Tell me a little bit more about the show this weekend. I know you're taking a bunch of your stuff out there to show. What's the show this weekend?

Erin Cuff: Yeah, so the show This Weekend is called West Coast Craft. It's at Fort Mason in San Francisco,

George Irwin: which is super beautiful great venue that's right

Erin Cuff: on the water on the bay in the marina. And there's like, I think 275 different artists and vendors. So it's a pretty big show And I'm sharing a booth with one of my good friends

George Irwin: who's also an artist and goldsmith, Alexis Pavlantos.

Erin Cuff: So yeah, and I will have for any of you Northern California people all have some of the Desert Moonrise collection there to try on and see in person too.

George Irwin: Yeah that's something I think... I don't know it seems like selling pieces like this and showing pieces like this just on the internet and on Instagram, just with photos and videos is exceptionally challenging I feel like to get the real feel for the piece. And so yeah, if you're out there in San Francisco folks go check it out. Now's your chance or coming up as your chance I guess this weekend. Well cool Aaron, I guess you have stated kind of like in your bio and whatnot that you were inspired, I think by your grandmother to get started with jewelry

George Irwin / Erin Cuff: and the arts. Can you talk a little bit about her? Yeah so my meemaw, we're

Erin Cuff: from the South, my family, so that's what we call our grandmas in Tennessee. So my new mom became a jeweler in the late 70s, which was a time when not many women were in the trade. Jewelry is kind of an interesting trade and that it's made a pretty rapid switch from being male dominated to being female dominated. Yeah, and so like most of of the OG like stone setters and jewelers that I know in the industry are men, but most of the younger generation of jewelers are women which is pretty interesting. So yeah so my grandmother when she became single again after getting a divorce in the 70s needed to find a career and liked jewelry and so she went to the Gemological Institute of America GIA is like the biggest and best jewelry school. And yeah, she made very different jewelry than I did. It was very eighties, late seventies, early eighties high carrot, lots of prongs, super gaudy.

Erin Cuff: I can't say she always nodded and smiled when she would see my work but she always had some interesting critique about it, which I thought was always funny. But yeah, she was amazing. She actually just passed away last month. So a lot of the schools that I have in my studio that I started out with were hers and it feels really special to be kind of carrying on that you know, kind of tradition and being the second generation of jewelers in the family.

George Irwin: Yeah, that's really cool. That's special to have that family connection. I feel like a lot of times, you know, a lot of the artists I talk to have kind of inspirational people in their families that they've seen do it from a young age. It's really cool. Well since we're in your studio would you

George Irwin / Erin Cuff: mind showing us around a little bit? Yeah! Of course! Well disclosure, I'm in holiday

Erin Cuff: mode. I'm sure a lot of the people out there who are also business owners will understand, and you know it's a working studio so it's just always a little bit chaotic but yeah I'll turn you around here. So this is the working part of my studio over here and then I have my set up for West Coast Craft that I am, you know, kind of fine tuning. My house is right outside those doors. So yeah, this was actually an old barn that my studio was built in. So these are all my tools. The process for my jewelry making kind of starts here. This is my wax injector, and I basically cast a lot of my work in-house. So I have all of these molds here which are kind of part of my more made to order collection. So basically I have a mold, I inject it with molten wax, and then I get a piece like this This is the Desert Moonrise Cigar Band.

Erin Cuff: And I can basically wax weld all of these onto a tree and then turn it into metal like this. So, this is like a bunch of different rings and necklaces, different findings. And the way that I do that is with my casting setup which is right here. And I do a lot of my casting in house, which isn't super common. So after I... Let's see, I'll turn me around here. So basically after I make that wax tree, I can make a lot of the same piece at once by making a temporary plaster mold and then putting the plaster mold into the kiln overnight at about 1700 degrees. And then the wax burns out of the mold, leaving a temporary open space for metal to flow in, if that makes sense. So then this is my furnace,

George Irwin: which I pour metal into in here and when this is on

Erin Cuff: it's like red hot there's like a couple videos on my glowing check out that are pretty fun to watch. So this heats up depending on the metal anywhere from 1500 to 1900 degrees Fahrenheit. And then I put the flask in here

George Irwin: which is still hot from the kiln

Erin Cuff: and then I pour the metal in with tongs of course and this is actually one giant vacuum that sucks air down through the porous mold. And so, the metal will flow all the way through where that imprint is. So yeah, so that's the casting process and then I have this which I have to make into a bunch of pieces that look shiny and new. So even though it is a way you know, a way to easily reproduce pieces. It's still very time intensive and the equipment is very expensive. So it's not just as easy as like, you know doing, oh, it's on a one-step thing. It's like a three day process to do each cast.

George Irwin: Finish kind of each individual piece then right?

Erin Cuff: Exactly yeah so then like once I clip each piece off of the off the tree, then I bring it over to my bench. This is my favorite tool, my big old John Fry custom work bench. And I have a flex shaft which is probably my most used tool and I use different sandpaper and burrs to clean and polish each piece. And I've got my microscope here for stone setting, it's a Lekka I got that last year which has really changed my work. And over here I've gotten my soldering set up so this is my little tiny baby Little Smith torch which a lot of you jewelers will probably recognize. So this is where I do a lot of my fabricating. This is what's called the pickle, pickle pot it's what I put all of my work in to take off all of the weird oxides from heating it up. Okay. These are a lot of my forming tools. I got a bracelet bender, a ring, ring stretcher, drill press, magnetic tumbler, auto sonic. Wow. Think

Erin Cuff: Yeah, lots of buffer. Lots of different tools in here.

George Irwin / Erin Cuff: Yeah, I mean this was this so

George Irwin: I mean, I know that you've been doing this for a long time and I don't know. I mean it was like more than a decade ago that you were learning in Guanajuato, maybe about how to do silversmithing?

Erin Cuff: That was actually at the very end of 2015. So it's actually only been like seven-ish years. And before that I've always been an artist in some capacity. My love was film photography and I was like that girl in high school always carrying around a canon 35 millimeter telling her friends to act natural. And yeah, so that was kind of my first love I moved to San Francisco

George Irwin: when I was 19 and kind of just worked in restaurants and didn't go to college which

Erin Cuff: ended up working out for me at the end but odd jobs and you know kept practicing my photography and was a woodworker for a while with a furniture company. And yeah, so I've dabbled in a lot of different creative practices and thankfully just on a whim found jewelry and it ended up working out.

George Irwin: Yeah, so that's... So I was thinking then too, has wiring all the different pieces, like all the different machinery and tools and everything has been sort of a because I've been like a gradual thing over time. Like you learn one sort of technique and then you get a new machine and you learn how to use that

Erin Cuff: and then... Totally it's been a slow build um

George Irwin: when i first started out I mean this studio is probably like 600-

Erin Cuff: 700 square feet and which is like way more space than I need as a jeweler to be honest. But it's amazing the first studio, the first will actually the first Studio Space I had was my old bosses studio that she let me work in after you know, in old Oakland, I worked for a designer for three years as a production manager. And that's kind of where I got my business chops after going to school in Mexico. It was like one end of the spectrum was all the crazy weird art jewelry that I made in Mexico and then like right after that was the total opposite end of this spectrum which was like you know just making pretty like simple antique diamond rings for the good people of the Bay Area. So yeah, I it's been a slow build. I didn't start out with very much. I had some tools from my grandmother and I had some tools form my best friend's great grandfather that her parents gave me and I made it work.

Erin Cuff: Thankfully, I've been able to invest and replace structurally not so great tools that I started with in the very beginning. And so it's a little safer in here now. But yeah, so it is jewelry business. It's a lot of, I've heard the joke so many times that if you want to be a jeweler don't expect to make any money because you're just constantly buying tools and materials to be investing in the business. And yeah, thankfully I figured out how to make a little bit of money but it's, you know, there is always a list of things of new tools and new techniques I wanna learn.

George Irwin / Erin Cuff: just kind of like an endless craft. It makes me think of like, you know, recording engineers

George Irwin: and people who have their music studios it's always like... A new foot pedal. They had to get this new effect that they just have to... Whatever they just made on recording the last band

Erin Cuff: they put into the next piece of gear. Totally, yeah so but it's also makes it more exciting to me like I feel like I can just keep going and going and goin. I think that's what keeps my ADHD brain occupied because I can you know I can just always have little projects going on the side that I'm I'm just constantly exploring new ideas

George Irwin: Yeah, very cool. So this is sort of a unrelated question but do you believe in

George Irwin / Erin Cuff: nominative determinism? You're gonna have to explain what that means. It's like when your name kind of dictates what you end up doing? Oh, I mean yeah I guess I have to.

Erin Cuff: I guess my last name is Pab. And like yeah it's funny because I have so many people ask me like is that your real last name and I'm like yeah I mean I don't think I could have made that up. There's another jeweler right now whose last name is Silverstein and she's a silver up too. So yeah, I mean I guess I have to believe it.

George Irwin: Yeah that's kind of a funny thing to me but you know like it's funny to um I don't know I guess you don't notice it when it's not there but if somebody's doing something where it's got some relationship with the name then you're like oh well maybe that's how they got the idea, you know? Yeah totally. But I do like that there are two, you know, like two cuffs in this collection with Western Gallery.

Erin Cuff: Yeah, I mean cut- I love making cuffs because they give me such a big amount of space to work with and funny because I know like most of the artists that you show or painters or you know drawers work on like a much bigger scale than I do. Right. Like funny to like think that like a six by two-inch piece of metal is huge for me to work with, but it really lets me explore going into a lot more detail.

George Irwin: Yeah, my favorite shapes and stuff that you can work with or can be bigger and different relationships between the elements I think than probably on the smaller scale. Well, so what I guess... so before you got into doing the silversmithing, what took you down to Mexico and were you were you doing other jewelry before that?

Erin Cuff: Let's take a question. I dabbled in stringing shells to hemp, all sorts of weird stuff in high school. I think a lot of people start out with weird things like that. There was a time when me and my old roommate were wire wrapping feathers that we got from Michael and like ungodly things like that.

George Irwin / Erin Cuff: I think super serious, always just for fun.

Erin Cuff: I think I was at a time in my life where it was pretty like serendipitous the first few, all the opportunities that presented themselves to me in my first few years of being in jewelry. I was working on a farm after quitting my job as a woodworker. And I knew I didn't really want to do that anymore. And, I was working on the farm and somebody on the farm just mentioned that this girl that they knew went to Mexico and like studied for six months at this school and the teacher was an ex con biker from Canada named Billy Kang who like drink a lot of beer and I was like, cool sign me up. That's great. And yeah, so I like two weeks after I heard about this school, I just went. It was pretty, I had nothing else really going on. I was kind of at a wandering time in my life. Like a ton of direction but like a lot creative energy and yeah it was more affordable than any of the you know

Erin Cuff: jewelry schools in the States so I was just like you know I will educate myself like two birds one stone. Yeah, so I went down there and I was there for first a month that's all I had saved up for and as soon as I got there I was like this This is awesome. I need to come back. So I went for a month, came back, saved up some money and worked and went back for four months. So I did five months total and I lived in a couple different places in San Miguel de Allende. And yeah it was a really amazing opportunity.

George Irwin: That's awesome. I love hearing that you just kind of hear about this interesting, I don't know, it's almost like not even an opportunity so much as just like this thing that exists and then you just go for it. That's great.

Erin Cuff: Yeah, it was definitely a hole in the wall school. So, I mean, I think the man has ever advertised, I dunno what advertising is. So it was very serendipitous that I found it. And I got my first job in the industry through a former student that had gone to the school a couple years before me. So, it was like all these things falling into place at the right time and thankfully I read the signs and kept going and now I'm able to do this full-time to support myself.

George Irwin: That's fantastic. Love hearing that. Well, cool. I'm curious... So we're featuring the Desert Moonrise pieces and I know that you have kind of like some other more kind of contemporary lines, I guess. How do you find your inspiration for the direction that your different bodies of work go in? And how do they stay cohesive, I guess with each other? Do you have any- Like is there a lot of planning?

Erin Cuff: Yes and no. I tend to like when inspiration strikes it's usually at the bench. I don't do like a ton of sketching beforehand. I mean, a lot of my work comes out of my piles metal gold scrap. Like I'll have a weird piece that's like an interesting shape and just kind of go with it. The desert moonrise pieces, the second piece of jewelry I ever made was a pendant that was like one and a half by one inches, a rectangular piece of metal that I sweat soldered a desert scene on two with the moon in the middle and the, you know, a cacti on the sides. And my teacher Billy helped me figure out the technique to be able to do that. And it really just stuck. I will say I have a pretty strong aesthetic perspective that I've had for, you a lot of my life I've like always drawn and painted and you know been interested in folk art.

Erin Cuff: And I think that kind of like, I've always like kind of without knowing it like studied like a very specific type of work that really resonates with me. So I think that it's just like, it's not really contrived. It's just, like it's kind of like my, like new ideas meeting like where my mind has always been aesthetically and I'm really thankful that I have that clear you know... I've tried to stray from it before and it just hasn't worked out. Like when I was

George Irwin: when I was thinking of going full-time,

Erin Cuff: I was working full time for another jeweler and like working after hours, an extra few hours every day and just working my butt off really. And I was really concerned about being able to support myself after leaving this job. So a lot of me wanted to make work that I thought was like put my artistic side aside and make a small collection that was easily sellable. Or at least I can see. And lo and behold, I'd made a few pieces that were a little more not as inspired and people were still drawn to the work that was really coming from my artist self without sounding too cheesy. So yeah, I think that I've got a design alphabet from my design mind of textures, different metal types, and like different metals put together. Different connections because jewelry is very three-dimensional. And it's really you have to build it and make it work and make joints.

Erin Cuff: And that's where a lot of my furniture making mind comes into play. So yeah, there's just like different, a different, you know, kind of letter that I can like throw into each piece and then like rip on that and see what comes up out of it. And sometimes pieces are sitting on my bench for like, like I'm looking at a piece right now that's been like all my bench three months that I really need to finish. So it's, yeah, I mean, I imagine this is the same for painters too. like they have different elements that they put into play.

George Irwin / Erin Cuff: And yeah.

George Irwin: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I don't know. I've talked to painters who kind of do it across the whole spectrum from very kind of planned out and specific about exactly what they want and how they're gonna do it. And then to painers who are just completely intuitively going and drawing on whatever they have learned throughout their lifetime as well. But yeah, that's interesting. And that's really great to hear that you are comfortable with your instinct and your artistic education to date and can pull all those things together into coming out with a few different lines of jewelry.

Erin Cuff: It's awesome. Yeah, I've learned to really be able to lean on it. It's, I think it was really scary for me to lean on it at first because of imposter syndrome and just like being new and establish myself in the jewelry world

George Irwin: which is like extremely saturated which I'm sure you can understand with like all,

Erin Cuff: there's a lot of artists out there. So yeah, I'm really happy that I've learned how to trust that, trust that side of me because not everyone has that artistic voice and I need to take advantage of that.

George Irwin: Scott, Scott Ruthven Fine Art has a good great question here which is how do you balance the creative intuition with the production volume necessary? Scott, can I go ahead? Can I edit your question a little bit and then I think Erin was just saying that like it's... I don't know if it's that's the balance that she's got to strike. I think that it's like maybe handmade unique pieces versus production volume. I don t know what do you take from that

Erin Cuff: question, Erin? Yeah! I think even though some of my work is reproduced and

George Irwin: And none of, just to be clear, like all the pieces for the Western Gallery collection,

Erin Cuff: the majority of them are all one-of-a-kind. And that's kind of my trajectory with my work is being able to establish myself to

George Irwin: be able to make more one- of-a kind pieces, like the ones I've done with Western Gallery. The four bands are the one of the...

Erin Cuff: It's the guard bands. But yeah, it's a great question. It's been a slow build to be able to take the time and carve out the time to create those passion pieces because I do rely on stores and events and engagement rings. do a lot of like custom engagement work, which while they're all you know handmade and you know some of them one of a kind. They're just a different body of work you know from the same person and the same voice but just with like a little bit different of a function. And yeah so I mean it's always it's Always it's always hard to find the balance I'm finding more and more that the more chances I take with my artistic pieces, the more it's paying off. And the more I can let go of that fear of spending too much time on certain pieces that are going to be a little bit more expensive because they have more fine materials in them

Erin Cuff: or they've taken me months to create and I think that has been really encouraging.

George Irwin: Yeah, I like... That's a good answer. I mean, that's the name of the game in being an artist really is just allowing yourself to take those risks. And yeah it's always, I feel like it's It's always a struggle and kind of complicated to figure out how that works out with squaring the bottom line in business. But yeah, good question Scott. All right well Aaron let me think what else should we touch on here? Is there anything that I haven't brought up that you've been wanting to talk about?

Erin Cuff: I think we've covered a lot of it, honestly. I think that I will say the opportunity to kind of show my work in a fine art setting has been really important to me and it feels really good to be recognized in that capacity. And I think that goes back to Scott's question of, balancing production pieces and the passion pieces. Because it's also not just about currency of money, but it's like currency of being fulfilled as well. And this has been really fulfilling to push the envelope a little bit with my work for this and having a prompt. So yeah, I look forward to creating more of these pieces. Yeah, thanks for the opportunity.

George Irwin: Yeah, I was going to say thank you for letting Western Gallery be that setting and venue for presenting these pieces is something I'm really interested in, I think. Like you were saying before, most of what I show are paintings, right? and drawings and paintings. But I feel like there are so many different expressions of fine art that deserve to be presented in a way for being the art pieces that they are. And so it's been really fun to show these pieces. Let's see, oh, I would love it. I know, you know like this video that, you know, I try to do that if this intro video for all of the artists i have just gotten... I've had to start over like two or three times on yours. I'm sorry, Eran it's not your fault at all, it's just having a hard time with it. But I would love it if you would talk a little bit about the materials that you use because I know that they're

George Irwin: all top-of-the-line really special materials and especially like the your choice in stones and whatnot as well.

Erin Cuff: Yeah totally um can you hear me okay? You just cut out a little bit I heard your question.

George Irwin: I think you probably, you got to just what I was asking that right.

Erin Cuff: Yeah okay cool um yeah so materials wise um I there's a few- I do a lot of mixed metal jewelry meaning um I kind of put a lot of different materials together.

George Irwin: The base of a lot the pieces for the collection at Western Gallery are Sterling Silver and Argentium Silver.

Erin Cuff: Argentium silver is a material I recently started working with that has like totally blown my mind. It is point, so a lot of you know that UCF is stamped with the numbers 925. That means the piece is sterling silver because it is 92.5% fine silver. The rest of the 7.5 percent is what's called an alloy and sterling silver it's usually copper and zinc I believe in our general It is 95% fine silver, so there's actually more fine silver in it. And the alloy is something called germanium. It's an alloy that was created in like the early 90s by some guy I don't even know who was probably screwing around in his studio and was like...

George Irwin: The bargain that went on.

George Irwin / Erin Cuff: ... at work.

Erin Cuff: basically Argentium allows me to fuse pieces together of high Karat gold and the and the Argentium silver without using solder. If I heat them to a certain temperature in a certain way, the metals vibrate at a certain temperature and then fuse together which makes so much easier any jewelers out there like will understand like from looking at the work that I do on all the sweat soldering that I did, it just can get really messy with solder really quick. So a huge game changer for me and I discovered it and started working with it like a couple weeks before I started making like all this work is like my first time working with our GENTM so So I'm really excited about it. But yeah, so the rest of the materials I use all of the gold that you see is mostly 22 karat gold,

George Irwin: which is the easiest to bond with Argentium and sterling

Erin Cuff: silver without solder. And then there's also some 14 karat and 18 karat gold mixed in. All of these stones are diamonds. In the cuffs, there are recycled.

George Irwin: Now what does recycled diamond mean?

Erin Cuff: That means that the stones are cut from, you know, if a zales closes down, all of that jewelry that is liquidated from that store closing, this was just like one place that a recycled diamond could come from. Then recut, like taken down, metal is melted down and the stones are taken and resold as recycled pieces to jewelers loose or they're cut into what's called melee which is anything that's under three millimeters. That's a diamond so yeah, I try my best to source only recycled and antique diamonds. They're not Recycler Antique. I'm sourcing sustainably from small diamond dealers who work with artisanal miners in Australia and Africa, so the salt-and-pepper diamonds that are in the yucca earrings those are from a small artisanal gem cutter in New Mexico. So yeah.

George Irwin: Yeah, I mean that's, I don't know. I think you know that's as important as not as important, but it's an important piece of any kind of fine art to know that the materials are, you know. The ship's good, right? Yeah so great well thank you for... so okay backing up the sweat soldering that you're talking about I'm not familiar with it so is that what you're talkin' about with the gold and the Argentinian bonding together without solder that's sweat soldery or is that what's soldering a

Erin Cuff: different thing altogether? Sweat soldering is with sterling silver So if I have a piece of silver and I want to solder something onto the top of this, I put it on my soldering block. Put a moon or whatever I'm soldering on it and then I from below and I and I place solder in between the two pieces so they're the solder is sandwiched in between like the pieces I'm soldering together and then i heat from below, and then it kind of like heats the whatever's on top. Like it sweats the solder in it so that's what I don't know I think that's why they call it sweat soldering. That's a great question.

George Irwin: Yeah, it's like a... like you heat up the sandwich. Yeah, yeah sure. But then that but then with the... sorry and he just said this but I'm just... it's really wild to me so the Argentinian then and like the 22 karat gold you can fuse just through heat. Yes. Wow. Yeah, so basically like the

Erin Cuff: the molecules on the surface of each piece of metal that are coming together once they reach a certain temperature, the molecules vibrate and then become

George Irwin: one. Which just makes for a lot it looks a lot cleaner than if there's

Erin Cuff: like I had something that if you saw two pieces like next to each other like I could give you, it's probably something you would really need to like look at but i notice it and it makes, it probably cut the time down that it takes to make each of those pieces down by like 30 percent so it makes it more sustainable for me to keep working in that direction. So it was an exciting discovery.

George Irwin: Yeah I bet.

George Irwin / Erin Cuff: Seven years of making these pieces.

George Irwin: Cool. And then also another question for those, you know, like myself who don't know a lot about jewelry at all the when you're talking about like the seven and a half percent or the five percent of an alloy in with silver is that alloy just sort of like make it more stable or sturdy? Or what does what does that do

George Irwin / Erin Cuff: with the metal in there? So that's a great question. So the alloy makes it

Erin Cuff: more, for sterling silver specifically, it makes it more sturdy. Copper helps, yeah, it helps like the bendability of a piece as well. The malleable with gold, it's from

George Irwin: what I know more of like a price point situation because pure

Erin Cuff: gold is extremely expensive, right? 24 karat gold is pure gold with no alloy. 22 karat which is a lot of what I use is like the next step below and then there's 18 and there's 14 and there's 10. Antique jewelry is like nine carat too. So yeah the more high carat it is, the more pure gold it is which also means the more bright yellow it is that's why I love 22k because it's just a beautiful like royal color like

George Irwin: when you think of old Roman jewelry or like a Trescan jewelry or Byzantine

Erin Cuff: it's all like super high carrot, which I love. 14 karat, which is also what I use in some of my work is much more durable. 14 carat and 18 carat I used for a lot of my bridle work for engagement rings because of its durability. And yeah, so that's usually alloyed with sterling silver which copper in it. I see cool. Yeah sorry I feel like I just nerd it out. No

George Irwin: I love it all those, all these kind of things. I don't know I like to know how stuff works together you know and um cool well Erin uh I can't thank you enough for putting this um you know this collection together for Western Gallery. I have really enjoyed learning a little bit about fine jewelry and goldsmithing and silversmithing and all that goes into it. And I appreciate you taking the time to educate me here and there for taking the chance to show your work with Western Gallery. Totally, the opportunity has been great. Totally same here. And good luck with the show coming up in San Francisco. Thank you. Anyone wants, if there's any Northern

Erin Cuff: California people out there, you can go to my page and see all the events that I'm doing this holiday season. I'm also doing an open studio on the 27th for anyone interested.

George Irwin: Oh very cool! And then that's erincuffjewelry.com and then your handle, I guess because you're on here, I don't know it's like, I think it's ericuffjewELRY right?

Erin Cuff: Yeah, just Erin Crop Jewelry.

George Irwin: Well excellent. Well, Erin thank you so much for showing us around and talking today. And we'll just oh I was going to say keep us posted on new developments or whatever got new pieces coming out and anything else. Meanwhile if you haven't seen her stuff go to western.gallery and check it out. And y'all have a great time. Thanks Aaron. Talk to you soon. Bye.