In Which the Artist Completes Her Very Own Ring Cycle

As you look at the pictures in this post, please imagine to yourself "The Ride of the Valkyries"* being sung with the following lyrics:

I finished the classwork,
finished the classwork,
finished the classwork,
finished it all,
I finished it all...

And oy, such sturm und drang!  There was the time I lost the ring I was working on, started a new one, only to find out that the first ring was sitting right there in my toolbox, right where I thought I'd left it in the first place.  There were my various trials by fire, the clouds of chemical vapor rising from the pickling pot, the polishing of my knuckles on the polishing machine I didn't even want to learn how to use (and hey, how come they still aren't smooth?).  There was the day I came to class with no supplies (accidentally) and nothing to work on and just turned on my heel, left, and went grocery shopping.

Oy!

And this is what I have to show for it.

I made one ring for my true love and one for me.  The big green cabochon is an unusually opaque moss agate, and the little yellow one is just your garden variety banded agate.  I wasn't even thinking of putting stones on these rings, but one day my teacher just walked up and gave them to me.  As it happens, the green stone, a bit bluer than it appears here, is just about the color of my true love's eyes, and the yellow one goes with my hair.

They each have the words "TRUE LOVE"stamped inside the shank.

These might be the only rings I will ever make.  I really don't love soldering too much.  I do see the pleasure in it, and the potential for addiction.  I told my friend Xine that I can see how the joy that comes right when the solder suddenly turns to liquid and runs up the silver could be just like that episode of Star Trek TNG where all the people on the Enterprise get hooked on some video game that stimulates their pleasure centers every time they get a ball through a hoop or something, only scarier.  (That scariness, incidentally, would be because of the EIGHT INCH FLAME.)

She told me that was the geekiest thing she'd heard all week.

The one for my true love is a bit big, so he wears it on his forefinger.  He has other silver rings, too, and when he puts them all on, he looks very rock 'n' roll.

I forget what made me say it -- nothing to do with jewelry making, I assure you -- but at some point today, I asked, "Am I not a genius?  Am I not?"  (I think it had to do with my technique for tricking the cat into eating kitty health food, another topic for another day.)

"Yes," he replied.  "And this is the Ring of Genius."

"Yeah, Crooked, Rough-Edged Genius."

"Ooooh, I like that!"

"It's the very best kind of genius."

I will let the late, great Birgit Nilsson* express how I feel about finishing this class.  Click on the rings to hear all about it.

__________
*  It should be clear that the MP3 of the "Ride of the Valkyries" to which I have linked comes from Aaron Ginn's page on Wagner, specifically his synopsis of Die Walküre.  It is also excerpted from a recording of this opera starring Birgit Nilsson.  I thought the clip to which I have linked the last image came from an NPR feature on Birgit Nilsson at the time of her death, but that features seems to have different selections attached to it now.

Comments

[alphabitch]

ooh, shiny! very nice work. I especially like the words stamped inside. An old friend of mine has a set of those letters, and he made me a keychain once out of a brass washer that said on it "MAKE IT SO." That is just how geeky I am. The really funny thing was that he was not himself a fan of STNG; had never even seen it, but had heard me say "make it so" from time to time and thought it was a cool thing to say.

Anyway, I liked the keychain so much I made one for my sister, after she totalled her car, that says, "DON'T FLIP YOUR CAR OVER." I'm still working on the oven mitt embroidered with "DO NOT PLACE ON HOT BURNER." Embroidering through teflon is a bummer.

[Sara]

Ha ha ha -- very helpful!

The stamps are excellent, and though I will not be doing soldering again if I can help it, I have many, many projects planned using letter stamps. They are very inexpensive, so I picked up two sets, one in the 2mm size and one in the 3mm size, at Contenti, a very fun place to browse.

[Bipolarlawyercook]

Very nice. I find your rough edged genius quite appealing. : )

[Sara]

Why, thank you, BLC. Of course, the key for it appealing to my true love might be the word "crooked." Crookedness is essential to the kind of genius that can perpetrate mad science, don't you think? It's just another way of looking at "linear." ;)

[Michelle]

Awesome! May we please see True Love's rocker hands sometimes? I'm intrigued....

[alphabitch]

Wow, I had no idea they were so cheap! Must have at least one set!!! That catalog is awfully nifty; you may have created a monster.

[Sara]

Sognatrice, I will transmit your request, but that is entirely up to my true love, who is camera shy.

Alphabitch -- all I can say is "mwa ha ha." ;)

[alphabitch]

Just his hands, maybe holding a coffee cup? I understand if he's too camera-shy to have a bunch of women he's never met swooning over pictures of his hands, but there are several of us who would like to see your work in its intended setting.[/smirk]

[elizabeth]

I too applaud crooked genius, indeed, I sort of assumed all genius worth having was crooked, cranked or otherwise had a slight tilt.

I would LOVE to make rings for you, you can do the crafty part and I will do the FIRE. Haha, eight inch flames, I bet I can make that sucker twice as long - hoooo baby! Sorry it is just that Linda (and the city of Victoria, the State of California, the Nation of Wales and the city of Gettysburg have so many ludicrious restrictions...and maybe accusations about me and flames - so you ever need someone to put their face into a 8 inch flame, just call!)

[Sara]

Alphabitch, my true love feels his hands are unbalanced because he only wears three rings and also because the tai chi he studies and teaches is not represented. When he finds another forefinger ring, specifically one with a yin/yang symbol on it (the official symbol of tai chi), he has indicated he might be more receptive to the idea.

Elizabeth, putting your face into the flame might be a little counterproductive! Ha!

The problem is that the technique I was taught involves itsy bitsy microbitty bits of solder placed ever so preciously over tiny little areas -- pieces so small that if the flame was too big it would blow them off the project, and then I would have to pick them, half-softened already, off the table and replace them with tweezers and try again. But then if the flame was too small, they wouldn't melt within my lifetime. The process for creating a ring that I was taught is this (and no, I don't think it was exactly the process Sauron used):

1. Cut strip of 18-gauge sheet metal (silver).
2. File strip of silver until long sides are perfectly parallel and mirror-shiny and one short side is at a perfect 90° angle from each and also mirror-shiny.
3. Choose ring size. Measure diameter of size from inside ring form on one side to outside ring form on the other side, then multiply by pi.
4. Cut strip to size determined by above formula.
5. File the end you just cut until it is parallel with the other short end and mirror shiny. If you want to stamp a message into the ring, now is the time.
6. Whack the strip around a ring mandrel with a rawhide mallet until it is ring-shaped.
7. Make sure the ends meet precisely, with no gaps. Tie it into a tight ring using binding wire.
8. Solder the ends together using itsy bitsy eensy weensy chiplets of medium silver solder, just two of them, and an eight-inch flame.
9. Pick off the binding wire, pickle off the fire scale, then polish.
10. Select a cabochon. Cut a piece of 18-gauge sheet metal slightly bigger than the cabochon's base.
11. Tightly shape a piece of bezel strip around the cabochon.
12. Using 2mm long bits of medium silver solder placed around the outer base of the bezel, seal the bezel to the sheet metal. Pickle off the fire scale.
13. Trim the sheet metal until it is within a mm of the bezel all around. File the sheet metal until it comes up flush to the bezel and no seam is detectable.
14. File the seam part of the ring shank until there is a flat platform.
15. Using a cm or so of easy silver solder, solder the ring shank to the setting you have just created with sheet metal and bezel. If/when it's on straight, apply medium solder for a permanent join. Pickle off the fire scale.
16. Place the cabochon into the setting. Work the bezel from the base upward until it embraces the cabochon firmly and there are (ideally but not the way I did it) no lumps and bumps.
17. Polish the ring.

The soldering? It's like ten minutes out of the whole process. The rest? Hours. For a student anyway, hours.

So basically, you're telling me you want to go straight to the easy and thrilling part and skip the actual work? ;)

[alphabitch]

"So basically, you're telling me you want to go straight to the easy and thrilling part and skip the actual work?"

Ahem. Duh.

I've always thought of sewing as kind of like working with metal: it has to be exactly right, you have to do all the math, no fudging anywhere or it just doesn't work. Whereas knitting (or crocheting) is more like woodworking. It's important to measure carefully and get it all the right shape, but there's a little bit more leeway in terms of stretching or sanding or clamping things together. at the end. It's a little more forgiving.

Which is probably why I'm better at knitting. I'm working on the sewing, though. I just finished my first pair of flannel jammies this morning. They are a tiny bit crooked, but they fit over my butt way better than anything I've found in the stores. And of course the length is just about perfect. I'm having a blast in the new sewing room.

[elizabeth]

I'm with alphabitch, the fact that you actually listed FROM memory all the other boring bits means you got that covered - I'll just take over when blowtorching needs to be done - really for any reason.....want to light those Xmas candles....from 12 feet away - just call!

[Sara]

Alphabitch, I admire your skills. I can only sew by hand because sewing machines snicker audibly when I get within three feet of them, and with good reason. Something about those blasted bobbins.

And Elizabeth, thanks. I'll definitely keep you in mind for such tasks. ;)

Actually, there's something else I'm dying to try. And some techniques involve a kiln (and you can buy a small desktop kiln for this purpose, or there's also something called a hot pot that looks very intriguing), and some techniques involve flame (and I probably won't get into those), but the thing I want to investigate further is precious metal clay. PMC (by Mitsubishi; uses silver reclaimed from film photo negatives) and Art Clay are two different brands, and it's silver or gold that you can work with your hands directly, shape and mold like clay, but then when you fire it the organic binders burn off and you are left with pure silver or gold. A fellow Etsyer who uses this material to my profound admiration is Amy Moore, doing business as Honeybee, and I've seen many other fine examples.

It's wonderful stuff, and I am coveting one of those little PMC hot pot kits just to try it out.