The Craft Behind a Handmade Bracelet, Part 1 | Ken Hunt

The Craft of a Ken Hunt Bracelet

There’s a particular sound you hear in workshops where real work gets done. Not the whirr of a production line, not the thunk of an injection mould, but the quiet rhythm of human hands at the bench. The rasp of sanding metal, the soft thud of a nylon hammer shaping silver, the brushing of a polishing wheel, and the flutter of cloth as each bracelet is brought to brilliance. That is the sound of a Ken Hunt bracelet being made.

This is not manufactured jewellery. It is designed by an engraver whose scrollwork has graced London Best guns for more than half a century, translated to the wrist through a process that blends old-world craft with modern fidelity, and finished by hand every step of the way. What follows is a plain-English account of how we make a Ken Hunt bracelet.

It starts on paper

Ken would engrave guns without designs, and his reputation had earned him the freedom to be that creative. It’s the same here today. The now 90 year old Ken Hunt creates a perfect drawing spontaneously from whatever inspiration is in him. The drawings are not scribbles or digital mock-ups; they are full compositions worked at A2–A3 scale to preserve character, line weight and spacing.

This matters. Shrinking that artwork to bracelet size without losing life is not a simple rescaling. The negative space must hold; the leaf veining has to read; the scroll must still have space to breathe.

Since the founding of Ken Hunt we have done something unusual in the jewellery world: we iterated those drawings metal-in-hand. Ken draws; we engrave a test; we bring the results back to Ken; he adjusts, darkens a shadow, opens a background, changes the way a point terminates. That loop continues until the line in the metal looks like it was always meant to be there. That’s how the final engravings reach such an outstanding quality, because master craftspeople are still iterating and refining the real thing.