So yea, sorry all you old heads out there, these might seem like stupid and inane questions but I'm still fairly new to this game. First of all I've got a legendary mason who churns out masterpiece furniture like he suspects the miners will strike a magma tube or river at some point soon and kill them all. I'm trying to save these wonderful things for an awesome bed room/throne room/dining room/statue garden/tomb or whatever that some noble might demand or that I might feel like bestowing on one of the regular population, such as the general of my army or a seasoned combat vet or a blacksmith that makes a wonderful artifact/weapon or armor(should that ever happen). The thing is I'd also like to encrust these things with gems that I have found to increase their value and make it easy to appease the king should he ever arrive. So far I've got two stock piles, the regular furniture one another where I store my gems which I have also designated to store furniture of masterpiece or better quality. Once items make it to the second stock pile I can just forbid them till I want to encrust them, but when I want to do that I have to lock the other store house which is a pain in the butt to have to micro manage when I have other projects underway as well. Have any of you found a good way to go about this? Or is there a way to tell the jeweler exactly which item to encrust?(if not there really should be) I know this game is all about micro management but as my fortress grows this level of micromanagement where I have to watch what items a particular dwarf picks up brings things to a major stand still what with all the pausing. And also this leaves my jeweler without a job for a good portion of the time which I'd rather not have.
Second thing, my expedition leader is moving up in the world, he's now a legendary bookkeeper and as such no longer needs to keep records so most of the time he is also without a job. I was wondering if I recruit him into the military to begin training him in the ways of combat would he also preform his other noble functions provided his squad was kept off duty? At current he holds all noble positions aside from sheriff(which is still unassigned, I'm thinking about giving that job to my would be second in command military dwarf).
While I'm at it I was also wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of information concerning work orders, at the moment I don't see the point in using them rather then just going to the work shops and assigning work there, or designating things that need to be smoothed or mined.
Any help on these issues would be much appreciated, thanks in advance.