I love rings. Well, I love wearing them, anyway. I haven't really tried making rings before, and I realized that this was a pretty big gap in my jewelry making adventures. So I went hunting and found seven different types of "ring blanks" to embellish. This is what I came up with:
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| This ring base was one that had a single eye in the middle of the band. I think it was for attaching beads on headpins to make one of those cool cluster rings. But while fiddling around I realized that the eyelet fit perfectly into some flower components that I had. I domed one of my gears to help it fit into the design, and then stacked them all onto the eyelet, securing them with wire and a sparkly copper bead. |
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| This ring is maybe the most basic of the week. The ring base for this one was a plain brass band with several different holes in it. I'm really not sure what it's intended use was, but I used the holes to anchor some wire, then wrapped this cool clock key charm I had onto the base. Simple, but fun! |
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| I love quartz crystal points. I came across a bounty of them at the Crystal Connection, a local shop for VA rockhounds. When I found these filigree ring bases, I just knew I needed to wire wrap a crystal point onto one. I've had some very cool crystal point rings in the past, but they've all gone out of my life now. I'm crazy excited to have one again! |
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| I love sprinkles! And I've wanted to expand my experimentation with resin. This ring base with a deep bezel seemed to be the perfect opportunity to combine the two. I used a UV curing resin because it takes so much less time to set than regular resin, but I had issues with teeny tiny little bubbles forming. By the time they rose to the surface, the resin had already started to set. I think that UV resin will be great for some projects, but the sprinkles just had too many gaps for air bubbles to hide in. Still, while not perfect it is perfectly wearable! |
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| This ring began as some sort of fidgety meddling on my part, and quickly became something extra crazy. The ring base is a neat domed circle with an eye in the middle for attaching beads. I happened to have big dish of safety pins sitting on my craft table, and started putting them through the eye just to see what it would look like. A few quickly became several, which became many, which became many many, which became lots. (Pratchett fan!) Once I couldn't fit any more onto the base, I started stacking safety pins on top of each other. I really love the result; it's so much more sculptural than anything I've done in awhile. |
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| The base for this ring was what most people think of when they think of a standard ring blank, a band with a flat surface for affixing some embellishment. I've been holding onto these cool etched buttons for a long time, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to use them. I had to file the back of the button flat, but that was the most work I did for this project. Other than that it was just glue, glue, glue. Still, the final results are pretty darnn cool. |
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| This ring turned out so much better than I thought it would! The ring base is pretty funky; it's a standard adjustable band but it has this weird filigree flower type bit on the front for affixing things to. The flower isn't flat, so I'm not sure what exactly it was intended for, as it doesn't seem to be made to hold glue or anything like that. I decided to use it to wire wrap as it gave me a pretty solid anchor point. I had this itty bitty snowflake obsidian donut that I wrapped onto the base, then embellished it with some tiger eye beads and a nice round quartz bead. |
All in all, I'm pretty happy with the way that most of the projects turned out, but using pre-made ring bases was limiting. That's why I've decided that next week I'm going to make seven different rings using my own wire wrapped bases. I'll see you then!
