The first skilled artisans said to have decorated fine jewellery with guilloche enamel were working in the mid 18th century. The methods and tools that were used have changed very little over the centuries. The patterns favoured then were still being reproduced in the 1950s. Guilloche is a decorative technique in which artisans use lathes, often referred to as rose engines. These machines have been in existence for hundreds of years and even those used by jewellers in the twenty first century were made as long ago as the middle of the nineteenth century.