Custom jeweler Jenny Vaughn: Made in Arizona

Jenny Vaughn is enamored by metal.

She has made a career out of melting it down, reshaping it and making beautiful things out of it.

Vaughn is an independent custom jeweler as well as lead jewelry instructor at the Mesa Arts Center. She spends her days teaching people how to use blow torches, chemicals and blacksmith-looking machinery to slowly tease out jewelry from scrap metal. 

The Show joined her at her studio to take a few pieces of scrap metal and turn them into something new.

Lauren Gilger/KJZZ

Full conversation

JENNY VAUGHN: Right now, and these are just kind of some end cuts of pieces that didn’t make it onto a chain, a failed practice ring. So, the nice thing about metal is that it can always be melted down and recycled, so that’s what we’re going to do.

LAUREN GILGER: So you use scrap metal almost always?

JENNY VAUGHN: Yeah, exclusively. It’s more fun for me as the maker because it involves a lot more, you know, fire, right? I’m a pyromaniac, maybe. But it does seem like a more kind of holistic approach to jewelry making, which I’m super interested in, you know, really really knowing where everything comes from. That it’s, you know, when we’re talking about stones and stuff like that, fair trade is super important, right? But with metal specifically, it’s nice to kind of take something that doesn’t really serve a purpose and give it new life, right? Through the cleansing effects of fire.

LAUREN GILGER: It’s like a phoenix. All right. So we’re going to melt it down. Here we go.

JENNY VAUGHN: You have a couple of different torches here. This is a cast iron mold. It’s got all these different kind of cavities here that we can pour into to make what’s called an ingot. This is a crucible, so it’s just a ceramic dish that we use to melt the metal into, and then we’ll use that to pour into the mold here.

LAUREN GILGER: She’s bringing out the torch.

JENNY VAUGHN: So, just opening up our gas here. All right, this is kind of bright, so just FYI. I’m going to light this up. There we go.

LAUREN GILGER: So we light it up. That’s quite a flame.

JENNY VAUGHN: It is quite a flame. And all that black smoke, this is an acetylene-only flame, so that’s our fuel. Now I’m going to introduce some compressed oxygen, so you see it brighten up. And you can hear that nice kind of hissing sound.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. It’s turning blue.

JENNY VAUGHN: Mm-hmm. So that lets you know that it’s nice and hot and a well-balanced flame, so I’m just going to go ahead and stick that on my metal there.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow, and it looks like liquid! That’s crazy!

JENNY VAUGHN: Yeah, we’re actually going to bring it to its liquid form, its melting point.

LAUREN GILGER: So all of those little pieces are just turning into one big blob sort of in the middle.

JENNY VAUGHN: Yeah. And I’m just going to put a little bit of this powder in it. This is actually borax. We use it as a flux, so it helps to clean the molten metal if there’s any contaminants in it, bring them up to the surface. So you can see it’s getting nice and wiggling. We call this the forbidden soup. Okay, so once we get a nice kind of spinning melt, where you can see the the surface dancing a little bit,

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah.

JENNY VAUGHN: that lets me know that it’s time to pour. So I’m just going to bring the crucible up here. And I’m never letting the metal cool down. You know, when it gets that orange film on it, that means that it’s cooling really rapidly and trying to re-solidify. So I always want to keep the flame on the molten metal and never give it the opportunity to harden before I’m ready.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. What’s the temperature, do you know?

JENNY VAUGHN: Um, right now it’s probably around 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s pretty It’s pretty spicy. All right, and here’s the pour. It’s going to happen pretty fast. And that’s our little ingot.

LAUREN GILGER: So it’s sort of in like a It looks like a slit in this kind of cast iron handle.

JENNY VAUGHN: Yeah.

LAUREN GILGER: Oh, and it’s already solid!

JENNY VAUGHN: Yep.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow.

JENNY VAUGHN: It It, yeah. It gets hard pretty pretty quickly. So this is kind of the raw material that every piece starts out.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow. Right.

JENNY VAUGHN: So uh this will make a really nice sound. You just dropped it into a little dish of water. That’s all that was. And now you can touch it with your fingers that fast?

JENNY VAUGHN: Yep, it's called quenching. So, here's our ingot. It's nice and solid.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. It’s definitely It’s like a science experiment in a lot of ways.

JENNY VAUGHN: Yeah, there’s a there’s a lot of science, a lot of chemistry involved with jewelry.

LAUREN GILGER: Did you know that when you went into this field? I mean, you you didn’t study science, I’m guessing.

JENNY VAUGHN: And And you know, there’s still so much that I don’t know, you know? I’m I’m constantly learning about different techniques and, um, you know, different formulas and ways to do things. And, you know, it’s really kind of boundless as an activity of things that you can learn. Yeah. And then we’ll cruise over to uh some of these machines back here. We’re going to use something called a rolling mill.

LAUREN GILGER: This is kind of like a giant pasta maker.

JENNY VAUGHN: That's what it looks like, yeah. So I’m just going to open the rollers a little bit and give it a little test here to check the tension.

LAUREN GILGER: You're sticking the metal sort of in between these two giant cylinders, right?

JENNY VAUGHN: Yeah, two steel uh rollers. I’m going to roll that way. And you’ll see it just kind of squidge out on the other side. So you can see it got that nice

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, it flattened it right out.

JENNY VAUGHN: flat surface. Mm-hmm. So we’ll just keep clamping down and rolling through until it gets to a thickness and a length that I like.

LAUREN GILGER: This is so physical, right?

JENNY VAUGHN: It is Yeah, it is. I call it like CrossFit for jewelers, you know.

LAUREN GILGER: Let me while you do this, let me ask you about sort of how you got into this. I mean, this is not a a typical career or hobby to end up in.

JENNY VAUGHN: You know, my mom was always kind of uh flashy with her personal style, lots of big jewelry, lots of bright clothing, um which I, you know, am also very much into. So I think that was probably like my first exposure that, oh, you know, jewelry and accessories is really interesting, right? Um and her father was a jeweler, like a hobbyist in his retirement years. Um and so that’s the first time that I really saw somebody making jewelry. And he made all sorts of uh really whimsical animals and things like that, you know. He wasn’t making engagement rings. And so, after he passed away, you know, it kind of went on the back burner just as I was growing up. And then I met uh a local jeweler named Haas Rogers who took me in under his wing as an apprentice. And so he had me polishing stuff up and talking to clients and stuff like that just to kind of get a first-hand look at what, you know, a working artist’s kind of lifestyle looked like. And so I was totally enamored by that. Like, "Oh, you know, this is real. Like, you can make art for a living." And like, this is definitely what I want to do, you know. I can’t work in an office, I don’t think. Like, I need to make stuff, I need to talk to people. And so, um once I latched onto that, I think it was just like non-negotiable for me, you know. It’s like I have one path, and like I just need to see that through, you know. So, that’s kind of how I landed where I am today. You know, after I put my work out there a little bit, people started getting interested in it, then I started getting a lot of inquiries about, "Hey, could you teach me how to make a ring or something in a weekend?" So I did some um, you know, I’d I’d rent a space from a friend who had a gallery space for a Saturday afternoon, teach some people how to make rings, and then I really fell in love with this idea of teaching and kind of like trying to get everybody else obsessed with the things that I like to do, you know? And so that just kind of snowballed a little bit, and then I got this opportunity here at the Art Center, and now I teach all week long.

LAUREN GILGER: I mean, so the sharing of it is one thing, but what is it that you love about the craft of this? Like what drew you to it? The physicality, the the artistic side, maybe the combination?

JENNY VAUGHN: Yeah, I mean I think, you know, metal specifically is like such an unusual material. It’s so hard, it’s so unforgiving. Like, it’s, you know, not to minimize the incredible skill that it takes to be a good painter or something like that, but it’s like, yeah, I can understand like the transfer of, you know, a paintbrush into the paint and then onto the canvas, right? But for a lot of people who don’t have any knowledge of metalworking, it’s like you look at something made out of metal and it’s just I I don’t How did that even happen, right?

LAUREN GILGER: I feel the exact same way, yes.

JENNY VAUGHN: Yeah. So really wanting to kind of dive deeper into that and explore it and learn how to manipulate metal, right, as like a personal victory, you know, um was like pretty motivating. And then just kind of falling in love with, you know, what we said earlier, like the chemistry and, you know, the physics of it, and the fire, of course. You know, I think it’s all just like very kind of enthralling, kind of sexy to me, you know. And uh that’s just what keeps me motivated making things.

LAUREN GILGER: All right, what's next with this ring?

JENNY VAUGHN: So this guy is a good thickness, you know. So I think what I want to do now is just kind of hammer it so it’s flat. You can see it’s kind of Pringles-shaped right now, so So I’m just going to take this big old sledgehammer on an anvil and just whack this guy a few times. So you can see that that flattened it out pretty quickly, so this is good. This is what we’re looking for. Now I want to cut the ends off so that they’re nice and straight, and then form it around into a circle so that it can fit around somebody’s finger.

LAUREN GILGER: All right. Jenny, thank you so much for having me out and showing me how to do this.

JENNY VAUGHN: Thank you so much, my pleasure.

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