... this blogger gave to thee...
... five gold rings!..
... four favoured films...
... three rosy bubbles...
... two iterations...
... and a tale for tugging heart strings.
Should I be changing the titles of the series to just "on the day..." given I've been so slow in getting them up and it's over a week past the end of the festive season? Or is that giving too many Ursula vibes?
Just a thought.
Day 5 and we're onto jewellery, which apparently involved me getting on the struggle bus and staying on it for way too long. Or in other words, I find Day 5 a hard one, not just this year, but every year.
I'm obviously not an active jeweller anymore, and part of my not making and not being able to design things to make, is that I don't really look at jewellery on Pinterest, or blogs as often as I used too. This means that when it comes to Christmas and this particular post, I don't have a backlog of pins to search through, or websites I naturally gravitate towards to find cool or interesting jewellery to pass on.
I'm obviously not an active jeweller anymore, and part of my not making and not being able to design things to make, is that I don't really look at jewellery on Pinterest, or blogs as often as I used too. This means that when it comes to Christmas and this particular post, I don't have a backlog of pins to search through, or websites I naturally gravitate towards to find cool or interesting jewellery to pass on.
"Pass the parcel. That's sometimes all you can do.
Take it, feel it, and pass it on. Not for me, not for you,
but for someone, somewhere, one day. Pass it on, boys.
That's the game I want you to learn. Pass it on."
(History Boys, 2006, Alan Bennett )
The only point in writing these posts is to pass on information. The only reason to write a blog is to pass on information, opinion and hopefully enthusiasm for something you've discovered and want to share and potentially start a conversation about.
With jewellery I've been out of the conversational loop for longer than I care to admit.
It didn't help that my first attempt at this post ran into some obstacles and I had to start the whole process over.
But, when I was looking at my Pinterest board dedicated to this particular post, I finally noticed a little group of gold rings that just seemed to hang together and make sense. So here they are. Five gold rings from five jewellers who are mostly new to me...
(Set of Stacking Rings, 18ct yellow and red gold.)
There are three things I instantly love about this set of rings by Louise O'Neill, the first being that they're stackable. Ever since I was little, I've loved stacking, interlocking rings, something that I went into a lot more detail about on last years Day 5, when I waxed lyrical about my love for jeweller Wendy Ramshaw, and is something I'm always instantly drawn too when it comes to rings.
Secondly is the colour. The ring is made of a combination of 18ct yellow and red gold, giving it a really subtle colour difference, which I think is just lovely, especially when it's in a matte finish as these are. I love a well done matte finish to a piece of jewellery, when you can see the delicate swirls from using sand paper or scotch brite pads... it's almost like the metal's covered in the beginnings of frost ferns.
And thirdly, I really like the shapes and how simple they are. These are the types of shapes I always used gravitate towards making, even when in my head I wanted to be the person creating organic, naturalistic looking jewellery as with some of the others on this list.
This is a chunky looking ring for sure, but there's something soft about it which I find really attractive and after pinning it to my Day 5 Pinterest board, I kept pausing at it and seeing things collect round about.
(Gold, Blue & Violet Ring, Brass plated with 16k gold matte finish, hand painted with special effects paint and pooled with resin)
Sometimes when I'm making up theses posts, I have way too many options, but no obvious way of linking them together and having it make sense. Obviously sometimes there is a theme, they all have a similar colour or technique in common, sometimes it's just the images/objects/themes organically coming together and somehow matching up until I've found a little group that makes sense.
This ring by Olya oBo, of oBo Creations on Etsy, was sitting close by to the Louise O'Neill stacked rings, and the soft matte gold, drew my eye from one to the other. I honestly do have a real attraction to matte finishes.
However with oBo's rings, the puddles of violet and blue within the rock pool like wells of the ring, which the listing says is the result of a a special effects paint sealed with resin to give it a three dimensional surface, was also of interest. The busy body creative part of my head is trying to work out what kind of paints would create those pearlescent bubble like cells, pushing the mica in the paint to create patterns. Maybe it's metallic alcohol inks or something like Daler Rowney's FW Pearlescent Ink, which, though they're acrylic, from memory had similar qualities. Even nail polish might give this effect.
But it's a mystery in the end. A pretty mystery.
But it's a mystery in the end. A pretty mystery.
(Ocean Treasure Ring Stack, Lost Wax Casting in 9ct Gold, with sapphire & amethysts)
Guess the link here? Yep, purple, blue and rock pools, original right? Ground breaking thinking there on my part!
The colour is the reason these lined up in my brain, but I love these organic, encrusted rings that look like they've grown out of the metal, like coral or lichen... I suppose I should maybe have added a Trypophobia trigger warning for this ring, knowing a lot of people really have an aversion to this kind of holey texture. So if you feel a certain way about holes, I'm sorry.
This stack of Ocean Treasure rings are by Ami Pepper, who bases all her designs on the shape and texture of shell which look to have grown around gemstones, in this case sapphires and amethysts. Each of Pepper's designs are hand carved out of wax and cast in precious metals (9-14ct gold) in a process known as lost wax carving.
Essentially the process is this. You carve your design in carving wax, then attach a sprue, a tube of wax to allow the molten metal to flow into your casting, and if you're doing multiple pieces at once, you then attach this sprue to a larger wax tube creating a tree like design. Next you put the piece into an metal canister and fill it with plaster before allowing it to dry. Once fully dry, the mould is heated and the wax burns away leaving the negative space where your carvings used to be. The mould is very carefully filled with molten metal, which flows into the cavities, cooled slightly, then quenched in water which cools the casting completely and disintegrates the plaster. The casting can then be removed from the sprue, cleaned, sanded, polished and perfected into a piece of jewellery.
It's a particularly good technique for jewellery such as Pepper's who carve their designs, as well as for casting multiples of the same element. Olya oBo's rings above also being a good example, as within their Etsy shop, they have multiple of the same ring in different colour stories, so having these cast will save them a lot of time and allow them to keep their selling price a little lower. This isn't always the case, but it can help.
I really love this style of jewellery, and Ami Pepper is completely new to me and I'm into it. These genuinely look like it could just be growing from the edge of a rock pool and formed round about a ring and some pretty polished pebbles. I particularly love the little mussels she's carved because I think that it not only adds to the naturalistic feel, but sets it apart from other jewellers who make things in a similar style. They're really lovely designs.
Architectural Riveted Rings, silver, gold plating, spray paint (2015)
When I started collecting together, the obvious link between these rings and the others was the colour. Initially I mistook this for either anodised titanium (the process of colouring titanium using an electrical current in an electrolyte solution or a blow torch, the colour being dictated by the voltage or heat the metal is being exposed too) or anodised aluminium (a similar process by including sulphuric acid and dyes) but in fact, jeweller Ruth Laird uses spray paint to achieve the colour within her work.
By using spray paint on her very linear, architectural jewellery, around the edges it has been worn away in a really natural, weathered fashion which softens the look of the harsh edges and allows the metal to peek through. Meaning that as it's worn, as the metal polishes and tarnishes, the paint will (I assume) also weather further, like layers of old painted surfaces tends to do with time.
I like that. I like that when jewellery is loved and worn, it changes. Every ding in a old ring, every scratch, it doesn't have to signify damage. Amber warms in colour with body heat and exposure to oxygen over time. Matte finishes can slowly polish. And this can signify life and love of an object. After all, people tend to hide away their jewellery in their boxes, in a drawer, it being too good to wear. Then they wear the things that have significance, even if they're not their most expensive and seemingly important items, they're the ones that live.
For me, in the little bit of my brain that still thinks as a jeweller, weathering means wearing. Wearing means something someone's taken time and love in making, isn't just sitting in a drawer not being worn. Wear your jewellery, and if you want to keep it in good nick, buy a silver polish cloth to give them a clean, I used them for final polishing and they're very effective. Or go and see if the original jeweller you bought from or one in your local area offer cleanings. But wear your jewellery, there's nothing sadder than it being sat unworn.
Jed Green is our final jewellery, and another who's new to me, and there's something about the cluster of glass, gold, silver and pearls that I find really attractive in her Double Cluster ring.
While I love half of this design, I'm not daft over the black sprouting wires, I understand that they help to balance the ring, that they add darkness, it is however the glass discs with their silver centres which I find really attractive. And Green's use of glass within her jewellery which I particularly appreciate. There's a lovely texture it brings to her work, and to this ring.
While I love half of this design, I'm not daft over the black sprouting wires, I understand that they help to balance the ring, that they add darkness, it is however the glass discs with their silver centres which I find really attractive. And Green's use of glass within her jewellery which I particularly appreciate. There's a lovely texture it brings to her work, and to this ring.
Aside from rings of clustering glass, and ones that look like glass finial flanking the fingers, Green also creates terrarium rings, with glass, pearls, and metal growing within. Which depending on what's inside of the glass dome, are either incredibly whimsical, with pops of colours and obvious flowers, or dark and enveloping, like creeping weeds in a graveyard. And while the concept of a terrarium ring isn't necessarily new - you can buy fillable glass dome rings easily enough through Etsy - but these are unique, and feel less like a filled dome and more like a terrarium with something growing inside.
With any of the designs from Green, it's the combination of metal and glass that really make them special.
I know this has taken forever for me to post. I definitely wasn't distracted by watching The Witcher and getting confused while writing this post. Mostly I just couldn't seem to get myself to work out how to write it... thus explaining why there's so much whittering. I do apologise for both that and my tardiness.
But I hope some of these designs were interesting to you, even if you just skim the nonsense I wrote and just look at the pictures, like a sensible person.
Merry belated Christmas and New Year! Part six "before the sun sets on the third day"...
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Listening: It's Been A Year - Greg Laswell
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