Every Lamaze edition starts the same way: a colour, a mood, and a stack of reference photos pinned above the workbench. Bloom began with a single garnet earring sketched on the back of a delivery note in January, and a promise to ourselves that this edition would use more pink gold than anything we’d made before.
Six weeks, start to finish
Week one is stones — sourcing, sorting, matching pairs by eye under the same lamp so nothing looks slightly off once it’s on a shelf. Weeks two and three are setting: each piece is set by hand, not cast as a finished unit, which is slower but means a ring can be resized or a clasp replaced years from now without starting over.
By week five the first finished pieces come back from plating and we photograph them the same afternoon, still slightly warm from the polishing cloth. Week six is simply packing twenty-four boxes, in order, and writing the number on the inside of each one — 1 of 24, 2 of 24, and so on down to the last.
Why twenty-four
It’s not a marketing number. Twenty-four is roughly what one small team can hand-finish to the standard we want in six weeks without rushing the setting work — the part that can’t be sped up without it showing. When it’s gone, it’s gone; the next edition starts from a blank page, not a reprint.
