Posts by Lou Pike Pyman

Nicholas has hand drawn a beautiful Christmas card for 2015, and he wants to share it with you. With the explosion of popularity of colouring in books for adults this year, it seemed the perfect opportunity to give you the chance to print his drawing out and colour it in!   Click here to download…

Our latest commission gave us the challenge of re-creating some precious family rings into a new and modern set of rings. Our customer was given three rings by her mother, which she first thought would look best used in one bold new ring. After deciding that one ring may be a little too dressy and…

The festive season and summer holidays are a great time to wear and enjoy your jewellery, and we have 5 top tips for keeping it safe and looking great: 1) Avoid wearing your jewellery in chlorinated or salt water pools. The chlorine can discolour and damage gold and silver, and can also damage gemstones and…

Welcome to our PIKE Christmas Collection for 2015. This is the second year that we have designed and made a PIKE Christmas Collection, and we are excited to share how we did it. Since we moved to our intimate studio workshop, we have been focusing on the design and hand making of unique, one-off pieces…

Topaz and Citrine are the birthstones for November – Topaz is the traditional option, while Citrine is the modern alternative. Topaz comes in a range of colours (see some beautiful colours here), including the very valuable Imperial Topaz. The comparatively less expensive and beautiful blue topaz has always been the clear customer favourite at PIKE.…

November is Topaz month and so it seems like a great opportunity to share the making of a beautiful pair of blue topaz earrings. The design might look familiar to some of you – the earrings are a special commission based on our Christmas Collection from 2014. This special commission started with a drawing of…

Opal is the traditional birthstone for October. It’s an interesting stone with a bit of a bad reputation – many people believe that it is a gemstone that brings bad luck. Most of this appears to be anecdotal and without evidence, however, many people including some of our customers swear that the introduction of an…

A bezel setting is a collar of metal that surrounds the outer edge of a gemstone. It is considered to be the most secure way of setting a stone. The reason for this is that each bezel setting is made taller than it needs to be, so that there is plenty of metal to push…

One of the most well-known sapphires in Western popular culture is the engagement ring that belonged to Princess Diana of Wales and is now being worn by Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge. The ring features an approximately 12 carat oval blue sapphire (the actual size of the stone has never been made public), surrounded by 14…