Jeni's award winning filigree techniques are both unusual and striking. Jeni is a true artisan and her abilities are immediately evident in all of her fine jewelry designs. The process to create seamless, hollow, filigree horse jewelry is extremely complex. This technique is quite rare and can require up to 100 hours of tedious hand carving under high-powered magnification. The effort is well worth is, as the results are stunning!
In 2007 Jeni’s Guinevere, filigree necklace earned the ATEA Innovation award at one of the largest trade shows in the country for the equestrian industry. Guinevere was the first filigree design that Jeni created in her hollow seamless fashion. Due to much of the detail involved Jeni did make some custom carving tools especially for Guinevere and these tools quickly became some of her favorites for fine detail.
Jeni continued to develop her technique further by including features like undercuts and complicated shapes in some designs. Ivy and Sadie, while they are drastically different in mold making technique, they both show Jeni’s willingness to experiment and enhance her technique. Jeni is not aware of any other artist who creates hollow filigree horse jewelry that does not have a seam. Working smaller to carve a pair of earrings presents a new array of challenges in this process. The fragility of the wax is a certainly a factor to consider. Carving wax is plastic based and can snap quite easily when so much intricacy is involved.
Jeni’s work often included graceful scrolling lines. Her collection of filigree horse jewelry combines complexity with a elegance inherent in all of Jeni’s work.
