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67 MorE INFo j Chez Monique Jewelry in Bali runs three daily silversmithing classes, Monday through Saturday. Advanced booking is required. Website: www.chezmoniquejewelry.com After a few minutes’ wait, I Wayan, the man in charge of the op- eration, came out with bottles of water and books of silver crafts. He asked what we’d like to make, and we looked at each other in confusion — we thought this silversmithing class was going to be a demonstration, with maybe a little tool-touching. We really didn’t think we were going to spend the morning making our own jewelry, but after a moment, we decided on rings: It had been five years since we’d gotten married and we still hadn’t dealt with the ring sit- uation — or at least not to our satisfaction (one misplaced here, one misplaced there). As more students started to trickle in, Jason and I decided on a de- sign with two geckos — a symbol of good luck in parts of the South Pacific — and the words “te gabis,” meaning “it’s good.” I Wayan sized our fingers and drew out the width and length of the rings on paper. We sketched in the details of our geckos: mine entwined their tails, while Jason’s were caught in the act of kissing. Once we had the paper version, the silversmiths cut strips from a sheet of silver and glued the paper to its shiny surface. Then we moved to a workbench and were handed a heap of punches with every kind of blade I could imagine — they were straight, curved, fat, thin, long and short, some with steep corners and some with no curve at all, and our job was to match the length, curve and thickness of the punch to the line on the paper. We spent hours picking up and discarding punches, searching for the perfect curve to fit the image: It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle, except you can’t see the box and you don’t know if you have all the pieces. I would say it was a labor of love, but really it was a labor of curiosity. I wanted to learn about silversmithing, and I was having one of the most hands-on lessons of my life. When we’d etched our geck- os onto the front of the rings, we flipped the strips over and punched “te gabis” onto the backs of each. Once the etching and engraving was complete, one teacher pounded the strip into the ring by hitting the metal around a piece of dowel with the handle of the hammer. We tried the rings on (good thing, since they were both too big) then used tin snips to slice off bits of silver until the rings fit to I Wayan’s satisfaction. Now properly fitted, one of the silversmiths used a tiny propane torch to weld the rings shut, after which point he painted on an oxidizing agent and left the rings in front of a hair dryer (the heat from the dryer speeds up the oxidization process and turns the silver black). After the whole thing had oxidized, he took the rings to an electric buffer where we polished them smooth. A progression of sand papers and brushes scraped off the oxidized layer from the flat part and allowed the black oxidization in the etching to stand out. We left and headed for lunch with our two new rings, forged to- gether exactly as we would have expected: five years late, perfectly flawed and unique beyond compare. He asked what we’d like to make, and we looked at each other in confusion — we thought this silversmithing class was going to be a demonstration, with maybe a little tool- touching. We really didn’t think we were going to spend the morning making our own jewelry.