amanda: intro to jewellery design

I apologize for the late post! But here's my take on designing rings.:)

After years of shopping for rings and imagining what rings I'd love to have, I decided to finally take an actual jewellery design course at my school.

 To start the design process, it is necessary to sketch out your ideas from various views so that when you are to make it, you will be clear about all angles of the design.

Then you make a wax mold of the design by sawing and filing a clump of casting wax. When you like what you have, you bring it to get it casted into your choice of silver, yellow brass, white brass, etc.

After you pick up the casted ring, you can see that there's a piece of brass sticking out. This needs to be sawed off carefully.

Then you must polish the ring with these sanding wheels to get all the debris off and see the brass shine through. :)

These tools are found only in a jewellery design studio so I can only work on my jewellery at the school's studio.

After hours and hours of hard work.. here's the finished product!

I personally like simple but edgy ring designs. This simple geometric ring is my very first attempt at jewellery design. I also casted it in white brass! How much would you be willing to pay for a brass ring like this one? 

Btw, this is my professor's website: http://www.geoffreygood.com/

Check out his stuff - it's pretty awesome!

laura: cute home-made rings

Awhile ago, I posted a "tutorial" on my personal blog on how to make rings out of wire + fabric. This was just a cheap random project that I thought of since I had some wire and fabric at home... and was in a crafty mood. But Amanda is the one who is learning about jewelry-making in her design classes so I hope she'll be able to share some tips on how to ACTUALLY make REAL jewelry one of these days. haha.. but for now, you will have to settle for my home-made version here...

For the full tutorial on how to make these, click HERE!

laura: DIY Ring Box!

I've been super busy lately with my new job (and NEW LIFE in Hong Kong) haha... which is SO different from Canada, so apologies for COMPLETELY lacking in posts... however, I see Amanda has been doing an excellent job of updating everyone on her life in New York, so I'll do my part and show you a little DIY craft that I actually blogged about on my personal blog, but since it's relevant to style and fashion, I'll post it here as well =) Anyway, here it is:

I think many of you know that I love to wear rings. The majority of my rings are back in Canada, but I am starting to breed a little collection here as well (yes... breed...). Most of these are either made (from this post here) or bought for $1 or 2 in Hong Kong. Since they're so cheap, I didn't want to keep them all in a pile just in case they started rusting. I decided to find an effective and cheap way to store my rings (and to prevent me from always losing them too)... 

 I bought a box that I liked...

...and some peach-coloured felt.

It's easier if your piece of felt is cut into one long strip. My strip of felt was wider than the box I bought, so I simply took the excess on the sides, and folded them in so that the felt strip would fit perfectly into the box. Then I basically folded the strip of felt, accordion-style, until I had folds (like the ones below).

At this point, you could use a glue gun or sew a few reinforcing threads into your accordion shape to prevent it from coming apart, but I didn't bother. The key thing is just to make sure your "felt accordion" is dense and packed tightly together, because if it's too loose, your rings will just fall down the cracks. Anyway, all I did was just stuff my felt accordion into the box and make sure it fit snugly. Then I put all my rings in, and there you go! A cheap ring box!

Now I have no excuse to lose my rings. 

I really like this idea because you can totally stylize your ring box any way you want. If you try this, I want to see what kind of box you choose and what colour felt you use! I'm sure it would look totally different from mine. Anyway, hope you like this quick craft idea! :)