One of the trickiest things about making jewelry is learning how to do something that you haven't seen — and better yet, tried — in person. Frankly, it's pretty hard to learn this stuff from a book, particularly if you're not adventurous. But McGrath's book, and its detailed, close up photographs, makes a pretty good teacher. Time and again I found myself thinking that a particular series of photos described precisely what it takes to accomplish a certain task, which gave me the confidence that another series of photos describing something I haven't tried yet was just as precise — and worth trying out myself. That's pretty exciting.

Having said that, I need to point out that this book does not take you from the beginning to the end of any projects. The majority of the book — the Techniques section — is presented as an encyclopedia: 31 of the "most often used jewelry-making techniques" presented in alphabetical order. Which means that sawing and piercing, which is one of the first things to learn when working with metal, doesn't show up for 100 pages. The start of a simple knotted ring is shown in the bending section, and the finished ring is shown about 90 pages later in the 'stick' soldering section. Creating a pin catch is shown in one section, riveting the pin on is shown in another, and we never get to see the finished brooch. Ever.

Still, the book's organization is pretty interesting, and I think emphasizes something McGrath mentions in the introduction to the Techniques section: "experimentation is one of the most rewarding ways to discover how metal works." If you want to explore a particular technique you can look it up and get a pretty good overview of how it's done. Not all aspects of every technique get covered in detail, but enough are to get you going, and related techniques are cross-referenced in the book. Once you've mastered the techniques involved, you can work on the design of the finished product.

Highlights of the Techniques part of the book include the annealing section, which has photographs and descriptions of the different colors the metals should be; the reticulation and Mokumé gané sections, which also have great photos of the processes that I haven't seen before; the section on catches and joints, which starts with a simple figure-eight and includes a spring catch from a chenier (tube) and a box catch; the RT blanking system, which includes pictures of the steel blanks in use; and making a loop-in-loop chain.

The book also includes a Themes section, which is a gallery of works divided into three parts: metals, stones and mixed media. Rather than focusing on the materials used, the descriptions of the pieces explain the techniques used to create them. This is a nice angle for a book to take. Although the book was published in 1995, the jewelry in the gallery doesn't feel dated.