Making a Garnet Ring with Offset Band- Metalsmithing

caitycat (59)in #steemartists • 5 years ago

Hello again!

Here we have what happens when I don't really have a plan and I just keep messing around.

This band started out as an experiment in texture. I had hammered the silver on 80-grit sandpaper to see what kind of texture it would achieve. It was neat (photo below), but not my favourite. Certainly an idea to keep in my back pocket for localized texture, but I think not for a whole ring band. So I sanded it off and started playing again.

I played with the shape of the band by filing off part of the edges, ending up with this shape:

Ideally I would have thought ahead properly and cut this shape out of the original silver sheet so it would be symmetrical. This was just done as I went along, which was a fun process too. So, it's not perfectly symmetrical, but I think that's alright. I also hammered it because I love hammered texture. It adds an extra bit of sparkle.
Next, I decided which stone to use. After much deliberation, I decided on this sweet little Hessonite Garnet. The colour is so lovely and rich... red in some lighting, orange in other lighting. I would say it averages out to a lovely cinnamon-mixed-with-honey colour. I sorted out a bezel size for it and soldered it up:

bezel wire and backing soldered together, now in the process of filing down the edges.

Looks good!

Perfect fit!

Next I had to decide how the heck I was going to put all this together. I played with the idea of centering the stone, but the off-set band looked really cool to me, and was a new thing I hadn't tried before. I showed both options to @mstafford and he agreed that I should give the offset a go.

So after some fiddling around to get it sitting just right, I soldered the bezel cup to the band:

At this point all I had to do was polish and set the stone.

See- the stone looking rather orange in low light...

...and quite red in daylight! SO pretty

still a bit of burnishing to be done on the bezel but overall lookin good!

I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out! Especially considering that I hadn't planned it out. I wore it for a while yesterday and it is very comfortable and light, but the stone is very eyecatching. I don't think I will keep this ring, though. It's not quite my own personal day-to-day style, so if anyone is looking for a cool garnet ring (January babies?) I would be happy to sell & ship. It's a size 9.

Thanks for stopping by!

Peace & Love,

Caitycat

#ocd-resteem #art #fashion #metalsmithing

5 years ago in #steemartists by caitycat (59)

$24.38

Sort:

Trending

[-]

mastersa (53) 5 years ago

I really liked the look of the sandpaper texture, I didn't realize you could do things like that! How do you make the bezel look so tight around the stone?
#up-gage

$0.02

2 votes

[-]

caitycat (59) 5 years ago

Thank-you! Yes, sterling silver will take on just about any texture you can imagine if you know what you're doing and have the right equipment! In this case, the silver was made very soft and pliable by heating & cooling several times throughout the process.
As for the bezels, there's no trick to it really. The silver bezel wire gets wrapped around the stone and measured/cut to size (you can kinda see what I mean in the first pic of this post), then shaped and soldered closed before being soldered onto a backplate. I'll for sure try to take a better pic of that part of the process during my next piece. Thanks for the great comment!

$0.00

1 vote

[-]