Jewelry

HANNIBAL, Mo. -- Randall Hurt is like the rare gemstones he works with: one of a kind.

In the age of technology where most jewelry is designed through computers and then constructed by robots, Hurt remains in the minority by designing and crafting his jewelry by hand.

"When you go into a jewelry store and the guy is insinuating they make their own jewelry and he's in a three-piece suit and his fingertips aren't blackened and burned and ugly, he's lying to you," Hurt said, showing off his own worn, tarnish-covered fingers. "The polishing process is kind of nasty. It gets pushed into the skin."

In his dim workshop, the Ava Goldworks bench jeweler and owner resembles someone from the medieval era. Most of his tools are primitive, made for sawing, chipping and engraving by hand. Only a few are electric.

"It's a lot of filing and drilling," Hurt explained as he carefully signed his mark on a silver heart. "It's pretty rudimentary."

Hurt is one of only 132 jewelers in the U.S. designated as a "master jeweler," and he collaborates with his daughter to create and sell unique handmade pieces in the family's downtown Hannibal shop.

A certified ‘master'

Hurt came into the jewelry profession "quite serendipitiously," he says. While living in Omaha, Neb., in the 1970s with his wife, Debbie, she noticed an ad in the newspaper for someone to resize rings at a trade shop.

"I had no idea at all of jewelry, but I knew I was good with my hands, and I was creative, and it seemed like it would be interesting to at least see what they were doing," Hurt said. He started working at the trade shop for $2 an hour and stayed there for six years. When he left, he traveled across the country with his family to work wherever jewelry stores needed a bench jeweler. As the years passed, Hurt accumulated more than three decades of experience making and repairing jewelry.

"Anybody can call themselves a master jeweler," he said, but not everyone is certified as a master jeweler by Jewelers of America.

Hurt took the 36-hour bench jeweler test administered by the professional organization in 2001. He had to craft three pieces of jewelry by hand during the test -- create the sheet metal, cut it, craft it and then set jewels inside it.

"It's tough. You can get through it if you let your work get sloppy, but they grade you on the quality of your work," Hurt said. "But I got through the time element and got graded highly on all of my projects."

He also passed two booklet tests testing his knowledge on procedures, tools, metals and gems. The next step for the newly certified master jeweler was opening his own shop.

Father-daughter duo

Hurt's daughter, Brandy, graduated high school in 2004.

"After she graduated, we talked about her going to college," Hurt said. "She thought she'd pursue a business degree, and I said, ‘OK, we can do that, or we could take the money we would put into college and try and start a jewelry store of our own, and you can learn business on the ground.' "

Brandy Hurt chose the latter option.

It was not until the family took a vacation in 2004 to Hannibal that they considered moving one final time to start their business.

Ava Goldworks opened in downtown Hannibal in December 2004.

Debbie Hurt runs the business, and Brandy Hurt does the advertising and photography. But, Brandy also apprenticed under her father in jewelry making, and by the time she was 19, she had won the prestigious American Gem Trade Association Spectrum Award. She now creates her own line of silver jewelry at Ava Goldworks.

"When we started this business, I helped with design," Brandy Hurt said. "We have different design styles. I'm more modern, and he's into an antique style. But we make a good team."

Debbie Hurt said that collaboration is good for the father-daughter duo.

"They'll bounce ideas off each other and pick out gemstone colors," she said. "The end results are something they might not have thought of on their own. It's also more fun for them."SFlb

A static profession

Although mechanized processes can make jewelry faster and less costly, Randall Hurt points out some advantages of creating jewelry by hand.

He said gemstones are cut in ways to maximize weight and beauty and do not always come in perfectsizes.

"Hand fabrication is perfect for those stones," he said. "It's an individual mounting for an individual gemstone. It's one of a kind."

Randall Hurt also said creating jewelry by hand leads to a more polished piece.

"These robots are so precise. But, the Achilles heel in the whole process is it (the piece of jewelry) still needs to be cast," Hurt said. "Castings always come out rough. If you have little crevices, it's very hard to polish down there. When I hand fabricate a piece, I can polish everything as it's being assembled so I can get into the crevices."

Embracing more modern jewelry techniques is not something the Hurts plan to do.

"We're old timers here," Hurt said, laughing. "Not very much has changed in jewelry work for hundreds of years. It's static. I like that."