JEWELRY CREATION
All The Camelia jewels are embroidered and assembled by hand by me in my small workshop located sometimes in Nîmes, in the south of France, sometimes in Leipzig in the East of Germany.
The particularity of The Camelia bijoux is the colorful embroidery that covers every jewel. The embroidery I use is a traditional Moroccan embroidery: Fès embroidery.
Fès embroidery
As the name suggests, this embroidery originates from Fès, imperial city located in the North-East of Morocco. Embroidery is a very old Moroccan traditionso that every region, even city, has its own style. The monochrome Fès embroidery is displayed in blue, red, black or garnet with geometrical and floral patterns.
Beyond its resolutely modern aesthetic, its particularity lies in the fact that it is strictly identical on both sides.Turn over a Fès embroidery and you will discover scrupulously the same pattern on the other side. The same goes for my jewelry. It is this specificity that makes the Fès embroidery a very complex technique to learn and master.
I was immediately fascinated by this embroidery during my internship at Salé embroidery school in Morocco (see page "The designer" to know more).Fès embroidery, like the majority of Moroccan embroidery, is traditionally applied to utilitarian textile objects. It is used to sublimate objects of everyday use such as linen and clothes.
My use of the Fès embroidery in the jewelery differs from the Moroccan traditions with the aim of modernizing and to make known this ancestral embroidery beyond the borders of Morocco.
The Camelia bijoux is the meeting of Moroccan and French know-how in order to enhance the value of craftsmanship.
The stages of jewelry making
The embroidery is at the same time the starting point of the creation of the jewels and the last step of manufacture of jewels. The idea of a jewel always comes from an embroidery pattern. After some sketches, comes the stage of technical drawing of the jewel that precedes the cutting raw brass pieces in northern Italy. Brass that combines copper and zinc is the basis of all my jewels for its strong resistance and long life. After different polishing steps to remove all the residues, all the pieces are gilded with fine gold by a craftsman gilder located in Paris. This technique involves applying a layer of gold to the jewels by dipping them in gold baths.
Finally, comes the hand emboidery of the pieces with colored cotton thread.This very meticulous step requires several hours of realization for the biggest pieces. It is during this last stage that the whole soul of the jewels comes out.
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