We followed one commission from the first conversation to the moment it arrived — a portrait of a grandmother, in 18k gold.
Every commission begins with a conversation. Usually an email, sometimes a phone call. The message from Sarah arrived on a Monday in October, three lines long: \'My grandmother died in July. She was 89. I want to make something to remember her by.\'
The Conversation
We called Sarah the following morning. She told us about her grandmother — a woman called Elaine, from Ballarat, a retired schoolteacher who had grown up on a wheat farm in the Wimmera. She had lived alone since her husband died in 2001, and had cooked a roast every Sunday without fail until she was 87. She had very strong opinions about the correct way to fold a napkin.
Sarah sent seven photographs. Most were recent — phone snapshots from the last few family Christmases, slightly blurry, brightly lit. But one was different: a black-and-white studio portrait, taken in 1961 when Elaine would have been in her early thirties. She was looking slightly off-camera, her expression at once composed and privately amused, as if she knew something the photographer didn\'t.
That was the one we chose to work from.
The Making
Eleanor spent three weeks on the wax. The challenge with Elaine\'s portrait was that private amusement in her expression — something that lived in the set of her mouth rather than in an obvious smile, and which was easy to lose. The first wax attempt was technically correct but missed it entirely. Eleanor reworked the area around the lips three times before it was right.
We cast in 18k yellow gold — Sarah had requested \'something warm\'. The pour was clean. The polishing took four hours. When it came off the bench, the piece was 42 millimetres across, set in a plain oval bezel on a curb chain, and it looked — quietly, unmistakably — like Elaine.
“Sarah called us the day it arrived. \'She\'s back,\' she said. \'She\'s just sitting there on the kitchen table and she\'s back.\'”
The Arrival
The piece was shipped in our standard presentation — a blackened cedar box, tissue-lined, with a handwritten note on Ashbourne & Vale correspondence card. We track every delivery personally and knew when it had arrived.
Sarah called us the same afternoon. She didn\'t have much to say, which we took as the highest possible compliment. \'It looks like her\' was what she kept coming back to. \'It just looks like her.\'
That is all we are ever trying to do.
