Rings and Things
I don't like wearing rings on my fingers. I even chose to get my ears pierced a second time and get wedding earrings instead of a wedding ring. So, I don't make too many finger rings to sell, as the format just doesn't usually inspire me.
And yet,
It sure seems like I've been making a lot of rings lately.
I did give it a go some years ago. In 2016 I was feeling fancy about my chainmail skills and experimented with making finger rings from it. I ended up with two very large chunky rings, due to the size of the loops I used, and fused into rigid rings without the usual flex of chainmail. You see, when we make a fist, the muscles in our fingers flex, and they are surprisingly strong. I learned pretty fast that if the rings weren't well soldered together, they'd pop open or stretch and distort when worn. The rigidity of being fused together was necessary for the designs, but it made them less interesting to me as a chainmailer, so I never made more of them.
Pardon the odd photo assemblage, these are from 2016. The left is a weave called Dragonback, I believe the rings were solder-filled (essentially silver with a hollow center). The right is HP3 in sterling silver, with 6 sapphires in tube settings. It ended up being size 11!
But recently, I've been teaching jewelry classes at The Crucible, an industrial art center in Oakland, California. This summer, during our Youth Camp, I found myself sitting in on a wire wrapping class. I had time to play around and all of thise wire right in front of me...
Suddenly I was looking up wire weaving videos online 🤔 This was not a sudden interest in making finger rings; it was an interest in the patterns that wire could make. (After all, I acquired the book Chainmaking for Jewelers by Matthieu Chemiee right around this same time.) But it turns out finger rings are a conveniently small size for quick projects. They let you explore a bunch of different things quickly. Great for R&D.
You know what is better than a braided wire ring?
A braided wire ring that spins.
Making a spinner ring was fun! I learned quite a bit from those two projects. Of course I immediately felt the need to bring this back to chainmail, because chainmail is what I love. I realized that using a spinner base could allow me to bring back the magical fabric-like flexibility of chainmail while still making a robust ring that can survive being worn.
The chainmail weave is HP4, and the ring is made mostly of argentium silver. Sized 10.5 as a gift for a friend.
Now this, I am into! Its a fidget toy. Its got hypnotic patterns. Its fairly unique. (Lots of people make chainmail, and lots of people make spinner rings, but not so many people doing both at once.) I have ideas for dome-y shaped rings that explore the flex of European weaves, or anticlastic hoop rings that center complex round weaves.
Meanwhile, somehow, I am still making other, non-chainmail, rings 🥴 The Crucible occasionally receives requests from couples who want to make their own rings. This is amazing, and we want very much to say 'yes' 🤠But we don't have a template for this type of private workshop yet. Because "a ring" is such a broad term actually: Simple band? Textured? Woven wire? Carved and cast? With stones? Silver or gold or rose gold or? Making some rings requires three hours, some others require three days.
So we're developing a small selection of templates that we can offer as "Rings for Couples" classes. They'll be immensely customizable, but it gives us and our clients a better starting place to begin the conversation, and to manage time and cost expectations.
Emphasis here on 'developing'. I have to know I can make it before I can teach it to someone else.
So I guess I'll be making more rings in the future.
