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[Pabbicus]

Is it possible to reserve certain materials for purposes at all? Say I have red, black, green and blue diamonds and I want to install them into some adamantine furniture, how do I keep Urist McJeweler from setting them into a willow bed intended for a random peasant migrant, thus wasting my incredibly rare finds?

[Astramancer]

gem setting is done specifically by gem type -- the jewelers workshop will have 'decorate with black diamonds' as well as 'decorate with green glass'.  So in this case it's as simple as just not decorating with your material of choice.

However, this does not guarantee that moody dwarves will pick your crazy-expensive gems.  A somewhat exploity trick is to forbid all materials but what you want your moody dwarves to use.  This can cause other production problems for the duration of the materials grab depending on what's being made at the time and what materials you had to forbid, and be sure to not forbid the stone that the moody dwarf's workshop is made from as he'll go crazy.  For this reason (and others), I prefer to build all workshops out of rock blocks, so when I'm forbidding stones from the zstocks menu I can't accidentally forbid workshops.

As for a more general method of reserving stuff for moody dwarves - some people like to make a small room with stockpiles for materials that moody dwarves like to use a lot that are somewhat rare (turtle shells on certain maps, giant cave spider silk cloth on certain maps, ect) that they forbid and reclaim if a moody dwarf needs it.  In this way, they don't lose a moody dwarf just because some random dwarf decided to make a giant cave spider silk bag back when you set bag-making on repeat a few hours ago.  You can also use this method combined with the 'forbid everything from the zstocks method' because then you only have a small area where all your good stuff is concentrated so you can just do a mass-reclaim on that one area.

[avari]

Making sure that certain gems are used in decorating jobs is indeed easy. However, I think Pabbicus actually wanted to make sure that certain items (adamantine furniture) were decorated instead of others (willow beds). This is more difficult. The way I do it is have a furniture or goods stockpile right next to the workshop, and set the stockpile to only receive items that I want to decorate.

When the gem setter wants to fetch an item to decorate, he goes to the nearest stockpile, thus usually fetching the proper item. However, I seem to recall that if the gem setter is not at the workshop when he gets the job, he might fetch an item from any stockpile he happened to be near. If he happens to use the wrong item, you can then forbid the item in the building view [t]; the job will be cancelled and the gem setter will then fetch the correct item for any subsequent jobs.

In any case, in my experience the decoration of certain items requires quite a bit of micromanagement at times and can be frustrating, but it can be done :) Similarily, stone stockpiles can be used to construct furniture out of certain stone, etc. - with a similar catch, i.e. if away from the shop the mason can pick up any stone to use for the first job. You have to be careful not to have any unwanted materials above or below the workshop as well.

[Astramancer]

You know, you're completely right.  I saw 'reserve' and immediately thought moody dwarf, re-reading carefully, it does appear I was wrong.  :/

So I'll just say "What he said" with the addendum that, to a dwarf, "closest" means "as the mole digs" not "path distance."

What this means is that a rock 2 zlevels straight down is closer than a rock 3 tiles over.  Despite the second rock having a path distance of 3 and the first rock having a path distance of 300.

One tactic that require less micromanagement is to have a stockpile that accepts what you want to be decorated next to the workshop (along with a stockpile for the appropriate kinds of gems).  Then install a lever operating the door to the workshop/stockpile area.  Change the profile of the lever so only the jeweler can pull it.  He walks in, pull the lever, locking him in, then you can encrust all you want without worrying random stuff that you don't want will be encrusted.  When you're done, pull the lever again, the door opens, and you can refresh the stockpiles.

Depending on your attention span, you may want to include a bed and a small food/drink stockpile, just in case you forget about your jeweler for a few years (learn from my mistakes!).

If you don't mind more micro, but still want to be absolutely sure that you only encrust what you want, you could put a hole in the roof of this sweatshop, dump in goods to be encrusted, gems to encrust with and food/drink.  Reclaim it and when you're done with the encrusting, dump the finished goods out a hole in the floor and reclaim it.  This way your poor jeweler cannot possibly encrust anything but what you want, and, bonus, he's protected from the hammerer (and any social interaction, and freedom, but what does a dwarf need with those?)