Todd Reed discusses his aquamarine cuff bracelet

By Tina Wojtkielo Snyder

It started out as a quick sketch on a napkin…and it ended up bringing home the Best of Show win in the 2011 AGTA Spectrum Awards competition. The design, a dramatic cuff drawn by Todd Reed of Todd Reed Inc. in Boulder, Colorado, took shape during some downtime at a trade show. Coincidentally, it was at that same trade show that Reed was approached by a friend suggesting he should enter the Spectrum Awards. “Robert Bently [a supplier of gem-quality colored stones] told me that I should enter the Spectrum if I had any designs with colored stones,” says Reed. “I got to thinking about the sketch I had been working on and the stones in my collection, and this aquamarine came to mind.”

Reed says the 22.35 carat stone was very special to him—one he had kept around for a while and liked to look at. It would serve as the perfect focal point for the bracelet, capturing the mood he envisioned for the piece. “I’ve been feeling so temperamental in the last few years,” he says. “I wanted to take the energy of the blue stone—its happy and open feeling—and make it a little darker.”

Reed achieved this goal by setting the aquamarine in a palladium bezel and backing it with a strip of palladium nestled into a blackened silver cuff, a common design element in his work. “The gray color of the palladium adds that drama-queen aspect that I was looking for—it works with the blue stone and evokes a certain feeling,” he says. When paired with the gray and white diamonds—9.21 carats in total—that dance provocatively across the bracelet, Reed says the feeling is reminiscent of “smoking a cigarette on a cold night.” He purposely chose white diamonds with black inclusions to echo the ice gray tone of the palladium, adding to the smokiness of the piece.

While Reed’s decision to bring the napkin sketch to life followed months of contemplation, the actual fabrication was completed in the week preceding the Spectrum Awards’ deadline—thanks in no small part to the choreography of his shop master, Josh Pass. It was a true team effort, says Reed, whose lead jeweler Andy Shavlick took the reins on the project. “She knows how to capture my sensitivity and emotion in a piece,” Reed says.

It began with Reed photocopying the napkin sketch onto a piece of paper and taping the diamonds in place around the aquamarine. Shavlick and a team of jewelers then set out to fabricate the bezels—37 in all—for the diamonds in the piece. In the meantime, Shavlick also worked on the cuff, struggling a bit to fuse the palladium to the silver with a torch. Considering the vast difference in melting temperatures for the two metals—sterling silver melts at 1,640°F/893°C while palladium 950 alloys melt at around 2,500°F/1,371°C—fusing the two was a challenge. “You need to control the torch masterfully and understand how the two metals work together to form the bond,” says Reed.

With the cuff complete, it was time to attach the diamonds. Because Reed varied the height of the stones on the bracelet—some are set 1 mm above the surface, while others sit 3 mm, 5 mm, or 8 mm tall—his team finished the bezels and set the stones prior to assembly so they wouldn’t need access to the top edges of each setting once the piece was assembled. The set diamonds were then welded together in seven small clusters, following Reed’s original design, and brought to him for approval. He duct taped each cluster to the cuff in the exact place he wanted it. Shavlick then traced the location of each cluster and cut the area out of the cuff in preparation for laser welding the cluster into place. Once all of the clusters were welded on, Shavlick set the aquamarine in its bezel and welded it front and center—a delicate task that required careful, steady hands due to the aquamarine’s sensitivity to heat.

For a bracelet that may have been designed off the cuff, it certainly teems with emotion. The result, says Reed, is something “very moody.”

Photo by Robert Weldon, courtesy of American Gem Trade Association.