I honestly cannot remember how I came to possess this lovely gold on sterling silver vintage brooch which featured carved gemstone flowers and leaves.  I have the actual box and accompanying slip of paper which is why I know it was designed by Canadian artist, Richard Shorty of the Southern Tuchone tribe. He was active in the 1980's.

The brooch is still in great condition but two of the flowers had fallen out as well as a bit of old glue residue - look closely at the picture below.



Upon closer inspection, many of the flowers were very loose. So I had to disassemble all the gemstone elements, remove the old glue residue as much as possible and prepare the surfaces for fresh glue. Not just any glue but really strong and fast acting glue.

As many of you already know, Super Glue, a quick acting cyanoacrylate glue, is not recommended for jewelry repair as it does get brittle. For some years, I used a different formulation of cyanoacrylate called Super New Glue. It 's a great glue but the bottles are small and I often found that the current opened bottle would be empty by the time I needed it again.

I have been testing out various glues from Starbond (use SBBG15 to get 15% discounts) more recently and have found these to be indeed excellent for crafters. The quantities are definitely more cost effective. I store mine in the fridge and they last for years. 

They also provide different pouring grades which is super helpful. I most often use the medium consistency - not too thick, nor too thin (the Goldilocks principle!). But in the case of this vintage brooch, I chose the thick version as I wanted to avoid watery drips. 


The glues come with caps which are replaced with nozzles. I snipped the end of the nozzle to use the glue. The red caps are then used to keep the glue bottle sealed. Fine nozzles also come with the glue for applications that need those. These tend to clog up after use so they have to be switched out to the regular nozzle/red cap for storage. I will have to try and clean the fine nozzles with 100% acetone as recommended by the manufacturer and see if I can recycle them.



Watch my 2 min Youtube short on how I repaired the brooch!


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Original Post by THE BEADING GEM