Surita du Toit – Owner/Founder
Designer, Shop Curator, Creator
Surita, completed her National Diploma in Jewellery Design and Manufacture at the Tshwane University of Technology in 2006, followed by a short course in diamond grading at the Gem Education Center in the same year. She has spent many years working as a CAD designer and manufacturing goldsmith and enjoys a new challenge. Though the business side of her creative mind embraces modern manufacturing methods for its speed, accuracy, and lower labour component, her inner nerd still has a particular interest in historical techniques and extant pieces.
Surita is currently enrolled in the Gemological Institute of America’s Graduate Gemologist programme.
Surita du Toit Fine Jewellery (Pty) Ltd. is a proud member of the Jewellery Council of South Africa.
Metal smithing, and by extension precious metal smithing, is one of the oldest professions in history. For thousands of years, generations of smiths and apprentices have contributed their knowledge and skill to this noble craft at the whim of emperor and king, and although much has changed, much of it has remained exactly the same. In the SDTFJ studio we use a variety of design and manufacture techniques, some of them modern, including CAD design combined with 3D printing and casting, as well as good old fashioned rolled metal bench work, the way it has been done for centuries. For millennia. The smith is not just a smith. The smith is also an artist, a poet and a craftsman. A slice of history. A modern being with an ancient calling.
“In the case of Smith, the name is so poetical that it must be an arduous and heroic matter for the man to live up to it. The name of Smith is the name of the one trade that even kings respected; it could claim half the glory of that arma virumque which all epics acclaimed. The spirit of the smithy is so close to the spirit of song that it has mixed in a million poems, and every blacksmith is a harmonious blacksmith.
Even the village children feel that in some dim way the smith is poetic, as the grocer and the cobbler are not poetic, when they feast on the dancing sparks and deafening blows in the cavern of that creative violence. The brute repose of Nature, the passionate cunning of man, the strongest of earthly metals, the weirdest of earthly elements, the unconquerable iron subdued by its only conqueror, the wheel and the ploughshare, the sword and the steam-hammer, the arraying of armies and the whole legend of arms, all these things are written, briefly indeed, but quite legibly, on the visiting-card of Mr. Smith.”
— G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
