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calis_stuff · ‎04-26-2015

I do quite a bit of rhinestone replacing but I'm especially proud of this large Coro Duette restoration.

Picked this up in a TS last week, one area of one of the clips had black/dead stones and the metal had a gummy black gunk over them. Not sure what it came into contact with but between the bead set stones and the gunk, those stones had to be removed by carefully crushing them and cleaning out the cups.

It was also missing a few of the other stones and a couple of the square central line stones.

After a few days of removing the dead stones and cleaning the settings I started replacing those stones yesterday.

Thankfully 95% of the original stones were fine and it was just a matter of getting the sizes right.

Every cup called for a slightly different size, none were consistant and I had to tuck them up under the sliver of metal to set them properly.

I just wish I had thought to take a 'before' picture.

A special shout out to Sarah for the stones she sent me a few months ago, they were a huge help.

calis_stuff · ‎04-30-2015

Don, I would just describe my procedure for the restoration. I try to keep the original look as much as possible. With the Czech clips I removed the pearls and cleaned the settings. Some stones fell out or were missing so I saved all the loose original stones and used vintage stones from a similar broken piece that I save for replacing these types of stones.

Then I replaced the original stones in the right place (took 'before pics') and replaced the missing with the correct type for this piece.

The only real 'newer' parts are the pearls.

All was done with G-S HYPO CEMENT.

That's how I would desribe this restoration, it's pretty true to the original.