Mardon Jewelers at the Mission Inn

We follow the gold market pretty carefully these days since we buy gold on a daily basis.  One of our resources is Kitco, a company that sells all forms of metals, and also offers daily market prices and other infomation and commentary about the metals market. Today’s posts at the Kitco website included this excellent article from the Montreal Gazette about how to go about selling gold.

We’ve published several blogs over the past couple of years offering similar information and advice about selling your gold, and it was good to see how well our blogs matched the information in this piece by a major newspaper.

We noted that the first tip is to work with a reputable company–we qualify.  With our long history of service (since 1961) to our community, Mardon is known for fair and honest dealing.

We were glad to see that the second tip recommends consumer education.  Our mission as members of the American Gem Society is to educate our clients. An example of this is our free gold value calculator and the blogs mentioned above.

If you have gold to sell, we suggest reading the complete article and the blogs noted (links above), and then come see us.

We buy gold by the daily market price– we’ll weigh the gold for you, determine the karat (gold content), and value it based on the total gold content. Bring all that you are looking to sell– since most of what we buy will be recycled, the more you sell us at one time, the better price we can offer because we can recycle it faster.

At Mardon, you’ll get 20% more value by exchanging your gold for store credit– a 20% bonus over the cash price. You can buy a new piece of jewelry, have us repair or appraise jewelry, or make a brand new custom piece. By exchanging the gold, you’ll get more value for your gold and you’ll get a better product– remelting old gold usually creates problems in the new piece.

We are always happy to weigh and value your gold, at no charge or obligation– and we are always looking for interesting heirloom and designer pieces. Items that can be resold just as they are have more value than simple gold content.

Give us a call or come by the shop– we’re open for business Tuesday thru Saturday, 10 am to 5:30 pm.

"Sliding"

It’s a real privilege to make gifts that have true significance in the lives of our clients. We made this gold pendant for our client as a special Christmas gift for his wife, a riding enthusiast who loves performing in the competitive sport of reining.

Sometimes described as a Western form of dressage, reining involves numerous maneuvers of precision and control, requiring complete communication between rider and horse. One of the more famous maneuvers is known as “sliding.” Read the rest of this entry »

Our beautiful Pink Star Pendant, of 14k white gold set with a 1/5 ct. round natural pink diamond, accented with 3/4 ct. tw. of white diamonds, is yours for just $2995– that's $46,155,679 US dollars less than the price paid for the 24.78 ct. emerald cut pink diamond that just sold at the Sotheby's November 16 auction in Geneva.

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Custom Gold Dog-Tag Setting

Just in time for Veteran's Day, we completed this great looking setting for a dog-tag. Our client's husband rarely wears jewelry, but she heard him remark about a dog-tag he saw David Hasselhoff wearing on TV. She brought us his original dog-tag from his military service days and asked us to make a nice piece of jewelry that he would wear.

She loves jewelry herself, so it was easy to suggest things that would make the piece special and unique. She wanted diamonds on the piece, and we thought what better way to space the gems than with military style stars! A nice thin bezel, complimented with milgrain style beading along the edge completed the treatment.

Then we decided to add decoration to the back. Repeating our theme, we made reverse stars and beading– it worked beautifully. He had a heavy 4 mm rope chain, so a simple oval loop of 10 guage gold wire completed the piece. Read the rest of this entry »

24.78 Fancy Intense Pink Diamond

The gem auction world is all a-twitter over this outstanding emerald cut diamond to be offered at the upcoming Sotheby's Auction, beginning November 16 in Geneva, Switzerland. Graded Fancy Intense Pink, the diamond is also unusually high in clarity, pronounced VVS2 by GIA. Described as pure pink with no secondary hues, the pre-auction estimate for this ultra-rare gem is is a sizzling hot 27,000,000–38,000,000! Wow!

For an affordable natural color pink diamond, consider this just-completed Mardon pendant, designed by Jim and Jenny Sweaney. We created this one-of-a-kind jewel with all re-cycled gold and recycled diamonds, including the .19 ct. center round, a very nice natural pink we discovered hidden in a flush setting of an estate ring we purchased. Read the rest of this entry »

We'd like to thank all of you who voted Mardon the Best Jeweler in Riverside for the second year in a row! Your support and patronage makes our work most enjoyable and enriches our lives in many ways.

Look for the Press Enterprise Reader's Choice magazine in the Thursday, November 11 issue.

We like to think of our shop as small but mighty! We focus on the things you just can't get at the big mall type stores and we try to provide quality, value and service second to none.

As always, we are constantly creating new designs– check out the latest addition to our famous Raincross Collection, our fabulous Technicolor Raincross earrings!

We added a special selection of gems to the pack train that visits the villages around Katmandu, Nepal– the incredible silver and gold smiths of the region will set them into unique new handmade pieces for our stock. With beautiful gemstone rings starting at only $75, the affordable jewels of Shangri-La have been a big hit this year, and are sure to find their way into gift boxes and stockings this Christmas.

In the coming year, look for exciting new creations that we'll design with our new digital stereolithography system.

Technicolor Raincross Set

They’re here! Our dazzling and very popular Technicolor Raincross Pendant in now joined by matching earrings! As with the original, these are high quality champleve enamel fired on fine (pure) silver by Magick!

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Enameled Art Nouveau Sweet Pea Pin

Every now and then, we see something that really excites us. Today, while working with a client on her new custom ring, we were discussing what to do with some pieces of jewelry that she doesn't use anymore.

We buy cast off and damaged jewelry to recycle, as well as consigning resalable pieces. As a big fan of all things Art Nouveau, my heart skipped a beat when she laid this enameled Sweet Pea pin in front of me and asked about consigning it.

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Daughter Jenny Sweaney and I are attending a 2 day ArtCam User Group session in Las Vegas. We will be getting the latest info on our CAD technology– ArtCam released the 2010 version of JewelSmith in August, so we’ll get a chance to discuss the new features and troubleshoot with crack DelCam staff– DelCam is the British parent company that created ArtCam.

The user groups are always fun and interesting because we get to meet a wide range of folks using CAD technology– last time, we met a woman from Seattle whose business is cake decorating. She uses ArtCam to create custom molds to form colored sugar decorations used by professional cake decorators and bakers!

Currently, we at Mardon use a CNC machine to create many of our custom pieces. CNC means Computer Numeric Control, a fancy way to describe the small mill/lathe we use to carve the wax models which we then cast by the lost wax method.

Mardon is in the process of acquiring another state-of-the-art technology for the creation of jewelery, a digital rapid prototype machine. This technology uses a blue ray laser to solidify resin compounds into models suitable for lost wax casting.

I find it fascinating that we are combining the very latest “space age” technology with an ancient technique developed in several cultures independently- evidence shows this technique of metal working in Indian as early as 5th century AD, and in the Pre-Columbian cultures of Central and South America.

Our use of these technologies, both old and new, allows us to create almost anything you can dream of– don’t wait any longer for the jewelry you’ve always wanted.

8.65 ct. cuprian elbaite tourmaline, before heat treatment

This tale of woe illustrates some of the risks and challenges we jewelers face in our fascinating business.

Last year, I had seen this lovely and large reddish purple tourmaline several times. Gem dealer Jack had tried mightily to tempt me with it, an unheated stone from the country of Mozambique in East Africa, an area that is producing controversial vivid blue and green tourmaline gems.

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