2026 Gem Show Classes

Cocktail Picks: 3 Hour Class Time: 1:00pm - 4:00 pm Instructors: Lynette Andreasen In this course, you'll learn to make fabulous and fun cocktail picks, bar spoons, and stirring sticks for appetizers, fancy drinks, or whatever you desire. We'll utilize the hydraulic press and impression dies to create decorative elements for our cocktail picks and stirring sticks. We'll use silhouette dies to form our spoon bowls, and we'll also cover twisting wire, forging, soldering, riveting, and finishing. Students will get to create practice cocktail picks with copper as well as a couple in sterling silver. We'll even save the last few minutes of class to make some mocktails and use our new utensils!

Make a Trinket Dish: 3 Hour Class Time: 9:00 am - 12:00 pm Instructors: Lynette Andreasen Students will learn to make a copper trinket dish with a textured surface. Students will learn to use texturing tools, pancake dies, silhouette dies, and a hydraulic press. All skill levels welcome.

Impressive Earrings: 6 Hour Class January 30th, 2026, 9am - 4pm, with a 1 hour break for lunch Instructors: Lynette Andreasen This fun, fast-paced introduction to working with a hydraulic press will cover how to make many different styles of earrings using pancake dies, silhouette dies, impression dies, and complex-forming dies (synclastic and anticlastic). We'll learn how to take simple forms, such as pancake die cutouts or silhouette-formed shapes and elevate them to more complex forms through scoring and bending, hollow constructed forms, and combining multiples. We will also cover how to use our ear wire forming tools and how to make creative ear wires. This is an advanced beginning to intermediate class, and students should have solid foundational fabrication skills including soldering, sawing, filing, and finishing.

Students will work with Kevin and/or Vincent using antique tooling and techniques to create jewelry. The classroom is located at 1949 E. Eastland, Tucson, Arizona, 85719.

This 6-hour intensive class is an introduction to using the hydraulic press for jewelry making. Learn how to use and become comfortable with all the different dies and accessories that can be used to make jewelry in the hydraulic press, including pancake dies, silhouette dies, FSS dies, and impression dies. Safety and proper usage of all tools will be included. Students will be able to learn with both a manual and electric hydraulic press, as well as use both our Rincon and Tortolita models. **ALL tools and materials included. The hydraulic press is an incredible asset for jewelers who want to produce custom, one of a kind, or production jewelry in the small studio setting. A hydraulic press can be used to blank out multiples, form multiples, and create die-struck jewelry with incredible speed compared to traditional hand methods, saving on both time and physical labor. Learn to put this work-horse tool to use in your studio practice! What you’ll learn: Introduction to basic safety and usage of the hydraulic press. What metal types and gauges work best with different types of dies. The basics of how to use pancake dies, silhouette dies, FSS dies, and impression dies for blanking, forming and embossing. How to get repeatable results for multiples. How to save on time and labor with tools and accessories in a hydraulic press. Using urethane with dies. … and MUCH more! The classroom is located at 1949 E. Eastland, Tucson, Arizona, 85719.