El Paso Mineral & Gem Society School
Memorial Park Senior Center
1800 Bryon Street
El Paso, Texas
(915) 562-4268

This school was established in the 1960’s, by the El Paso Mineral & Gem Society and the City of El Paso, in order to teach jewelry making techniques. These techniques include: lapidary, silversmith, lost wax casting, wire wrapping, beading, and last but definitely not least faceting.

LAPIDARY: This is the art of turning rough, ugly stones into beautiful, polished, gem stones suitable for setting into silver or gold, or for wire wrapping. You will be taught how to identify stones worthy of cutting and polishing. You will learn how to cut slabs of stone, shape them, and polish them and turn them into what we call cabochons. What is a cabochon you ask – you ever see those big belt buckles with the big oval or round stone in the center?? – that stone is a cabochon.

SILVERSMITH: This is where you learn to make the jewelry in which to set your cabochons or other items. You will learn how to solder, shape, and cut sterling silver in order to make beautiful pieces of jewelry. If you take the advanced class you will learn how to work with gold as well as silver.

LOST WAX CASTING: This is a very interesting form of making jewelry. Simply put: you will learn to make a wax form, then take the wax form and put it into a plaster mold, then heat the plaster mold, melting the wax and leaving an impression in the plaster, then forcing melted metal (silver, gold, or nickel) into the plaster mold, and then washing the plaster mold off the metal and having a very nice piece of jewelry that needs to be polished and cleaned. When using this form you can make a piece of silver jewelry, or make a piece of jewelry where you can inlay stones.

WIRE WRAPPING: This is the art of using wire usually made from either gold or silver to wrap stones, crystals, etc. This method of artistically framing stones, etc, is very practical for those hobbyists that don’t have the space or means for a lot of equipment. You can create beautiful pieces of jewelry using this method.

BEADING: You will learn how to create various forms of jewelry using beads.

FACETING: You may want to know first what is faceting? I’m sure you all have seen a diamond, emerald, or ruby set in a ring or a necklace – all sparkly - well what makes those precious stones sparkle is the art form called Faceting. You will learn how to cut and polish stones to create that unusual sparkly effect.

Our Classes Schedule 2011