Best Jewelry Making Books For Beginners: Expert Picks

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Getting into jewelry crafting is fun but also a slow and skill-testing process. Whether you’re looking to become a professional or an amateur craftsperson, if you want your rings, necklaces, earrings, and other complex jewelry pieces to look good, you are going to have to go through quite a lot of research, jewelry making books, and training.

Fortunately, as with most other crafts and professions today, there is a seemingly never-ending stream of information and guides online to help you become as good as possible at what you want to do. How do you navigate through all of them, however?

The huge diversity in the available materials such as jewelry making books for beginners and guides is so great that distinguishing the good from the not-so-good ones can be challenging to say the least.

So, to that end, here’s our list of the best jewelry making books for beginners you can find online right now:

1. Professional Jewelry Making: A Contemporary Guide to Traditional Jewelry Techniques

Where else should we start our list from other than from the classics? This book is a recent reprint of the original 1991 Professional Goldsmithing book written by the famous master goldsmith Alan Revere.

One of the bestsellers in this niche, the original book quickly became a standard text in the field. If you are serious about jewelry making, the second and revised edition is not one you should miss.

• The revised edition of Revere’s book offers new projects and a lot of new photos to the old ones.
• The quality and detail of the photos and guides in Revere’s Professional Jewelry Making contemporary guide are astonishing.
• The learning curve on a lot of the jewelry projects in the book can be a bit steep leading a lot of people to view it as an “intermediate level” guide. All projects are very well detailed and explained, however, making them suitable even for dedicated beginners. Additionally, the sheer significance of this contemporary guide makes it a must-have in our eyes.

2. Wire-Wrapped Jewelry Techniques

Next on our list is a book on a favorite subject for a lot of jewelry artisans, especially in the amateur sphere but not exclusively – Wire-Wrapped Jewelry Techniques by Lora S. Irish.

This book is an excellent first step into jewelry making for a lot of reasons, including its great design, a wonderful assortment of jewelry projects, easy-to-follow photos, and its budget-friendly price.

• This jewelry making guide for beginners includes 30 expert wire wrapping techniques.
• The book also includes 8 stylish and cool DIY projects that anyone from beginners to intermediate level artisans will likely want to try their hands at.
• The book is very beginners-friendly, making it a great first book to buy.
• All projects and techniques in the book are comprehensively detailed with photos, step-by-step instructions, as well as lists of the tools and materials you’ll need.

3. Teach Yourself VISUALLY Jewelry Making and Beading

Beading is a great first skill to learn when you start looking into jewelry making and the Teach Yourself VISUALLY Jewelry Making and Beading guide by Chris Franchetti Michaels is a great book for that and for many other techniques. It goes over hundreds of crafts designs that include bead stringing, bead weaving, wire wrapping, and others.

• All jewelry projects in this book are accompanied by detailed, precise and colorful photos.
• Each project also comes with specific step-by-step instructions.
• There are hundreds of helpful tips that are great for beginners to quickly climb the jewelry making learning curve.

4. Bench Tips for Jewelry Making: 101 Useful Tips from Brad Smith

Brad Smith brings us his book Bench Tips for Jewelry Making: 101 Useful tips and it’s a great inclusion in the library of any aspiring jewelry artisan. Brad, an artisan and a teacher himself, expertly summarizes his 17 years of experience in the field in this book. In it, you’ll find various illustrated tips that will be helpful all throughout your work on jewelry – from the beginning stages through the rest.

• The book goes over the 101 most common problems you’ll encounter on the bench while working on jewelry.
• These 101 tips include 20 practical ways to save time while polishing and soldering, as well as the 8 most common hazards you should avoid.
• All tips and tricks in the book are accompanied by colored and detailed photographs.

5. More Bench Tips for Jewelry Making

Not long after releasing his original book Brad Smith seems to have decided that his two decades of experience go beyond the 101 tips he’d included in his first book. His second guide, More Bench Tips for Jewelry Making, includes 86 more tips and tricks for jewelry making. It’s a great guide with or without the previous volume and teaches how to keep your costs down, how to utilize your tools as much as possible, and what are many of the common hazards to keep an eye on.

• The second volume of Brad Smith’s jewelry guides offers 86 excellent tips for beginners and intermediate-level artisans alike.
• Each tip is carefully detailed and explained in more than a page so the reader has plenty of contexts and additional information.

6. Soldering Made Simple

Soldering is one of those things beginner jewelers tend to fear – it looks complicated, hard, and risky. Fortunately, Joe Silvera’s book Soldering Made Simple does exactly what its title promises. It offers a lot of useful and practical tips for how to easily practice jewelry soldering in your home. Even if you’ve never held a torch in your hand before, this jewelry making book is a great starting step for any beginner.

• Joe Silvera offers detailed step-by-step instructions with his every point and tip.
• The Soldering Made Simple book is also littered with a lot of photos and visual aids to help you delve into soldering as easily as possible.
• The book also includes 10 excellent jewelry soldering projects for the reader to practice on.

7. 200 Beading Tips, Techniques & Trade Secrets

If you’re looking to get the most bang for your buck in terms of the sheer volume of tips a single book can offer, Jean Power’s 200 Beading Tips, Techniques & Trade Secrets is a great choice. The book is 160 pages long so most of the tips are described as concisely and briefly as possible, however, photo and other visual aids help guide the reader through them.

• All 200 of the tips in Jean Power’s book are vital know-hows for any beginner whether you’re looking for advice on beading, wiring, stringing, or other techniques.
• The book is full of photos, diagrams, and simple, understandable advice that will make any beginner get into the subject matter as quickly and as easily as possible.

8. Mastering Wirework Jewelry: 15 Intricate Designs to Create

For another great suggestion on wirework jewelry, the Mastering Wirework Jewelry book offers over a dozen amazing wiring projects for you to learn and practice on. All of them have very intricate and beautiful designs that you’ll be very happy to wear yourself, to gift to friends and family, or sell to customers.

• The book includes 15 great wirework jewelry designs for you to work with.
• Each of the designs’ crafting process is shown via a step-by-step guide accompanied by extensive photo aids.
• The book also includes very comprehensive sections on materials, tools, and techniques you’d want to know in order to master wirework jewelry.

Conclusion

There’s a lot to read, look at, and practice if you are to become a good jewelry craftsperson. With the right jewelry making books and materials in hand, however, you’ll be one step closer to your goal. Whichever ones of our suggestions have caught your eye, we hope they will be of great help to your practice not just as a beginner but even further down the line as you are becoming more and more experienced.