Inside a Bali Silver Workshop — How Handmade Jewelry Is Made

By Dmitry Strugovshchikov, founder of STRUGA

Every STRUGA piece starts as 925 silver grain and ends as an object whose surface keeps changing after it is bought. Nine steps sit between those two points. This is what each one actually involves — the temperature, the hours, the decisions — and why a hand-built ring and a stamped one are not the same product at two different prices.

Updated August 22, 2026

A STRUGA piece is built by hand from 925 sterling silver in nine steps, from design to hallmark. The casting itself takes about ninety seconds at roughly 960 °C; the filing and finishing that follow take four to twenty hours and decide how the piece finally looks. Production runs 2–4 weeks, often sooner, both for plain silver and for a piece with a set stone.

By Dmitry Strugovshchikov and Ekaterina Strugovshchikova, founders of STRUGA

The nine steps at a glance

The whole process runs in a Balinese workshop. Three of the nine steps are machine or kiln work; the remaining six are hand work, and they are where the hours go. A finished piece passes through the hands of three to five artisans before it is stamped. One object makes the sequence concrete: the Thorn Ring is 4.7 grams of 925 silver and goes through seven of the nine steps — both conditional ones, oxidation and stone setting, pass it by. Those 4.7 grams are cast in about ninety seconds at step 4; the ten to fifteen hours that decide how the ring finally looks are spent at steps 5 and 6.

Step	What happens	Hand or machine
1. Design	Sketch or CAD model; weight, fit and how the surface will age are decided here	hand and CAD
2. Wax model	The dimensional master — every line in the final silver exists in the wax first	hand, or printed then refined by hand
3. Mold and burnout	Plaster investment, staged kiln schedule, wax melted out	kiln, overnight
4. Casting	Molten 925 at about 960 °C fills the cavity left by the wax	machine, about 90 seconds
5. Filing and shaping	Sprues sawn off, surfaces worked through several grits	hand, 4–20 hours
6. Soldering and assembly	Links, findings and clasps joined with silver solder	hand, torch
7. Oxidation	Sulfur solution darkens the surface, highlights are cut back	hand
8. Stone setting	Each uncut crystal is selected and the bezel adapted to it	hand
9. Check and hallmark	Inspection, 925 stamp, photography, cataloging	hand

Steps 7 and 8 are conditional: a piece is either oxidized or left bare, and only stone pieces reach the setter. Everything else happens to every object that leaves the bench.

Steps 1–3: design, wax and the mold

Two paths converge at the start. Geometric, modular pieces — the BLADE rings and the BRUTALISM family — begin in CAD and go through digital iteration before any wax is touched. Organic, sculptural pieces — THORN amulets, the stone objects of the RITUAL world — begin as hand sketches and move into wax much earlier.

Design

The designer decides not only how a piece looks but where its weight sits, how it catches light, and how the silver will age. Some designs run through dozens of iterations before they reach the workshop floor.

Wax model

The wax is the dimensional master: every line, edge and surface texture in the final silver exists there first. It is either shaped by hand with files, scribers and heated probes, or printed from the digital model and then refined by hand.

Mold and burnout

The wax is encased in plaster investment and taken through a staged kiln schedule — moisture off, wax out into a catch tray, plaster hardened. Get the temperature curve wrong and the plaster cracks or wax residue contaminates the casting. The kiln works overnight; by morning a hot empty mold is waiting.

Steps 4–6: casting, filing and assembly

This is the middle of the process and the point where the object stops being a plan. The proportion is worth holding on to: the casting is over in a minute and a half, and the work that decides the result takes the rest of the week.

Casting

Molten 925 sterling silver, heated to about 960 °C, is poured or centrifugally forced into the hot mold. After cooling, the plaster is broken away with hammer and water, revealing a rough casting with sprues attached that carries the exact form of the wax.

Filing and shaping

Most of the time in the whole process is spent here. Sprues are sawn off and the piece is filed by hand through several grits, then sandpaper, then polishing compound. A simple ring needs four to six hours; a complex amulet with several textures needs fifteen to twenty. On brutalist pieces some casting texture is preserved deliberately — that balance is a design decision, not an oversight.

Soldering and assembly

Bracelets with links, earrings with findings, necklaces with clasps are assembled by hand — the 4.95-gram Thorn Bracelet is a run of separately cast links joined exactly this way. Joins are made with silver solder so the seam is the same alloy as the body and ages the same way. Each join gets a few seconds of localized heat; wrong heat melts the seam, wrong flame angle pools the solder where it should not go.

Steps 7–9: oxidation, stones and the hallmark

The last three steps are where two pieces of the same model stop being identical. Two of them are conditional, and the third is the only one that leaves a permanent mark on the metal.

Oxidation

Pieces headed for the blackened finish are treated with a sulfur solution that darkens the whole surface, after which the artisan cuts the darkening back from raised areas with fine abrasives. The same piece in the same solution comes out differently under two different hands, because each maker reads the surface and stops at a different moment.

Stone setting

STRUGA sets uncut, unpolished stones — tourmaline, aquamarine — and each crystal differs in size, colour and shape. The setter adapts to the specific stone, filing the bezel back or building it up. There is no standard setting when the stone itself is non-standard, which is why every RITUAL stone piece is structurally one-of-one.

Check and hallmark

Every finished piece is inspected on three counts before the stamp goes on:

• Structural integrity — joins, bezels and clasps under load.
• Finish quality — the surface reads the same across the whole object.
• Design accuracy — the silver matches the wax it came from.

The 925 hallmark is then stamped — almost always inside a ring band, on the back of a pendant or inside a clasp — and the piece is photographed and catalogued before it ships.

Living Silver — what it changes on the bench

Living Silver is a property, not a step: no rhodium is applied, so the bare 925 surface darkens on its own through contact with air and skin. It is the opposite of oxidation, which darkens the surface deliberately in the workshop before the piece ever ships.

Most commercial silver is rhodium-plated, and the plating hides small surface flaws behind a uniform chrome brightness. Without it, every micro-flaw stays visible, and three bench operations change because of it:

• Polishing — goes further, because nothing covers what is left behind.
• Sanding — more careful, since a scratch stays a scratch on bare silver.
• Solder seams — cleaner, because a plated seam is hidden and an unplated one is read.

The trade-off is that the finished object ages with the wearer — wear points brighten, recesses deepen, and the piece becomes a record of how it has been worn.

That single decision reshapes the workshop. Every step touching the surface — filing, polishing, oxidation, finishing — gets more attention than it would on a piece headed for plating.

The workshop and the tools that have not changed

A Bali silver workshop runs at human scale. Each artisan handles a piece from start to finish rather than passing it down an assembly line, which is exactly why two pieces of one model differ in small ways. Air conditioning is minimal, natural light is preferred, and the tropical climate means working with open doors year-round — surfaces oxidize faster on the bench, finishes set more slowly, and a Living Silver piece begins its patina before it ever leaves the building.

Era	Tools in use	Why it stays
New	3D printing for wax, CAD, digital cataloguing, electric polishing wheels	dimensional precision and repeatable records
Old	Hand files, charcoal and gas torches, leather buffs, hand-cut steel scribers	a hand file leaves a surface a powered grinder cannot
Neither	The artisan's eye	when a polish has gone far enough is a human judgement

How long a piece actually takes

Two different numbers get confused here, so they are separated below. Hand-work hours are bench time. Production time is what a buyer waits — it includes queue, curing, assembly and checks, and it is the number quoted on every product page. The first row below is a piece like the 9.6-gram Brutalism V.1 Ring: four to eight hours at the bench and 2–4 weeks, often sooner, before it ships.

Piece	Hand work	Production time
Simple ring (BRUTALISM, CODEX bands)	4–8 hours	2–4 weeks
Complex ring (BLADE, THORN signature)	10–15 hours	2–4 weeks
Amulet with a set stone	12–20 hours	2–4 weeks
Bracelet, multi-link	15–25 hours	2–4 weeks
Carbon pieces	varies by palette	2–4 weeks, always made to order
Custom Order or DARK UNION pair	by design	2–4 weeks from sketch approval; the design conversation comes first

The hours explain why mass production exists. The labour cost alone of a hand-built ring exceeds the entire retail price of a stamped one — they are not the same product wearing different price tags.

Where the craft school comes from

Bali has made silver for generations, with techniques passed inside families and villages in a chain that long predates any of the brands now built on top of it. For background, see the Balinese craft tradition.

The reason that matters practically is the apprenticeship chain rather than the age of the tradition. Many silver-making regions worldwide kept the tools and lost the transmission; Bali kept both, which is why a small-workshop, single-artisan model is still viable there at all. That model is what STRUGA needed — the design language does not survive division of labour.

Objects from this article

• ISLAND ARTIFACTS — pieces from this workshop
• Big Thorn Bracelet | STRUGA
• One-of-one RITUAL pieces with set stones
• AMULET — the family that takes the longest bench time
• All STRUGA jewelry

Further reading from STRUGA Journal

• The STRUGA Design Process: From Concept to Silver
• Best handmade silver jewelry in Bali
• Living Silver vs rhodium-plated silver

Sources

• Metal casting — Wikipedia
• Balinese art and craft tradition — Wikipedia