In photo on left, sea shells finished in Sterling Silver... just for fun, ca. 2002. (One is real...)

"The Diolun Designs [Cynthia Dillon's] items that my sister has created are all done using what is called the Greek/Roman Lost Wax method of casting, meaning that you sculpt the piece by carving it in wax, which is then used to create a rubber mold.

The wax melts, hence the “lost” in the name of the method. Once you have the rubber mold, you pour the noble metals, which become an individual one-of-a-kind piece. Once the piece comes out of the mold, you must polish it and finish it…one by one. Therefore, no one piece is exactly the same as another, because the jewelry is not machine stamped, the way most jewelry is done today. It is an artistically laborious process and a labor of love.

What all this means is that each item in Diolun’s collections have their own lines, curves, nuances and the like, which make each individual piece totally and truly unique. It is not like precision/laser copying done with a machine that might take a flower and go through its contours and reproduce it exactly the same. My sister sculpts by hand, not by precision machinery."~ Barbara Dillon Hillas (More)