When I had my jewelry professionally photographed, the photographer used a cone made of white translucent acrylic about 3 feet tall with an opening at the top to shoot through and a base opening of about 2 feet in diameter.
Lighting from the side, it diffused the light perfectly, removing the glare from the polished gold, with a warm soft glare free light.
If you anticipate needing to photograph a lot of work, you could do what he did and get a local plastic company to form a cone for you, he said it cost him about $20. The ease of the technique really impressed me @polarbrainfreeze.
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I truly CAN appreciate this technique but I had to laugh, as it brought to mind using a dog ‘cone of shame’ for getting just that right shot…
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I’ve put together my own soft boxes using PVC, appropriate connectors and decent material from local crafting shop. For the price, you can build a larger one than what you can buy commercially but if you don’t need that much space, probably better off buying a commercial solution, unless you just have to make it with your hands. 
A cheap dSLR and tripod go a long ways. I take photos for a living, but am usually backpacking in rather than sitting in a studio, but will try and post a couple pics later of what a cheap softbox can do.
That’s really not a horrible idea. After reading your comment I went home and looked at the “cone of shame” that I have left over from a doggy incident. It is a moderately thick, translucent, flexible plastic. A section cut from it could do very well for a setup like this one that was from amazon; essentially a bit of plastic clipped to an L-shaped frame:
You just need a source of light (or two, if you want to get rid of the shadows all together, I only had one light mounted in the phone-photos just now)
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Looking good!
Two lights @45 deg work best if you only have two. and then a white piece of board at the camera to reflect “soft” light back in.
Careful not to infringe upon the Amazon patent 
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Ug, that’s right, I almost forgot that amazon has tried to patent the idea of taking a photo on a white background. I just dredged through that junk again. It is one thing to protect your idea, it is another to hire people to find the wording to patent an existing process and any potential variation. What we are talking about making here is a miniature infinity cyclorama. Try as they might, they sure don’t own the idea of that!
Spot on.
Of course, it is always fun to play with lighting stuff differently. I snapped a couple shots with the “real” camera from that stand just now for ya, with the pictured 1-point lighting.
(my models stand so still!)
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Love it!
Funny, I have old books from the 60s that show that same lighting method.
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