The Art of Making Mokume Gane

Mokume Gane was invented in Japan in the 17th century to adorn samurai swords and means “wood grain metal” in Japanese. Making mokume gane is exacting & time-consuming and requires skills & equipment outside the usual range of jewelry-making techniques, some more akin to blacksmithing, so not many jewellers practise the art today.

It is essentially the process of fusing many layers of contrasting non-ferrous metal sheets so that they become a solid block or billet.  The billet can then be patterned and made in to rods or sheet metal with the charateristic grainy, layered mokume patterns.

I most often make the mokume billet into sheet to use in my jewelry. To begin the process I clean, stack and clamp the sheets tightly between two steel plates.  The clamped block is then heated until the separate sheets fuse together.

After removing the billet from the steel plates I hammer it with a hand hammer & power hammer to reduce some of thickness and pattern it several times at different thicknesses by drilling, engraving and carving in to the top layers to reveal the lower layers.

I then further reduce the thickness of the billet by hammering and with a rolling mill to flatten out the patterning indentations and create the working sheet.

(The picture left is a piece of silver & copper patterned mokume sheet when it has just been annealed during the rolling process, the copper oxidation giving a good contrast with the fine silver)

(The picture above shows a copper/fine silver/brass billet just after fusing.)