Ring-Making 101: Learn How to Make Rings in This Free eBook

Rings for your fingers, rings for your toes … I love ring-making and wearing rings. I’ll never forget my first metalsmithing lesson with Lexi Erickson, making stackable band rings. In just minutes, I (with Lexi’s help) turned half-round wire into RINGS! Real rings, soldered and textured rings that looked like the rings you could buy in a store. It was so cool.

Lexi’s same stacking rings tutorial is in our newest free eBook, Making a Ring: Jewelry Making Guide and Free Projects to Create Your Own Rings. In the eBook, you’ll learn to make three distinct types of rings: wire-wrapped rings, simple soldered stackable bands, and more advanced rings set with gemstones in bezels. You’ll also get a handy chart that helps you determine how much flat wire or metal sheet you need of whatever gauge you’re using to make a band that’s just the right size. What a ring-making dream!

With the three projects (each with design alternatives) for metal ring-making in Making a Ring: Jewelry Making Guide and Free Projects to Create Your Own Rings, you’ll have a ring on every finger in no time! The tutorials start with a wire-wrapped ring and then move on to soldering simple stack rings—and then look out! There’s no telling what you’ll make once you’ve learned to create your own bands! The next tutorial includes more metal fabrication and even bezel-setting stones.

Here’s a closer look at each ring-making tutorials:

How to Make a Wire Ring

Ring-a-ding Rings By Martha Umberger
Absolute beginners and pros alike will appreciate Martha’s wire-wrapped ring design. No soldering required! The whole thing is held together by cleverly placed wire twists and turns and takes advantage of wire tension. “I designed this ring to go with a two-toned bracelet I made,” Martha said. “Notice how you can finish the ring two different ways—clean and modern, or swirly and romantic. Take your pick, or make one of each to suit your mood!”

How to Make Rings and Solder Perfect Seams

Stacking Ring Trio By Lexi Erickson
These three silver band stacked rings are the perfect segue for jewelry makers who are new to soldering and want to make rings. You’ll master the fine points of ring making in this project, including how to cut precisely straight so that your wire ends match up perfectly for soldering, how to complete a simple solder join, how to reshape your ring so it’s round, and finally how to texture multiple simple bands into a finger full of unique stacked rings.

DIY Ring Stack

Stack Ring Suite By Helen Driggs
The next step in the progression of your jewelry making: ring making with stones set in the rings! This project, like the one above, is a great way to make lots of fun and unique rings to wear stacked or to mix and match with other stackable rings. These rings are more advanced, thanks to the addition of setting stones in bezels as well as the anticlastic forming techniques–but with these rings, you get a pass on exact sizing. “Simple to make, these rings don’t use much metal, allow you to practice tube setting as well as anticlastic raising on a small form,” Helen says, “and best of all, they are flexible almost up to the very end as far as sizing.”

How to Make Your Own Ring

Perfect Band Rings By Helen Driggs
You can use this handy chart to find the length of sheet metal you need for the metal gauge you’re using to make custom rings and to achieve the exact ring size you want. Simply find the ring size in one column and then follow that row until to the gauge of metal you’re using to make a band ring. That will tell you how long to cut your metal band. Voila! Perfectly fitting rings are just a few more steps away. You’ll also learn the five basic steps for making a band ring.

Interweave’s Editorial Director for the jewelry group and editor-in-chief of Lapidary Journal Jewelry Artist magazine, Merle White, is a fan of rings, too: “You can never have too many rings!” Merle says. “They can dress an outfit up or down, are fun to fiddle with, and can be worn one at a time, one on each finger, or even several on each finger—plus you can you can see them on yourself.”

Exactly! Treat yourself to an endless supply of new rings and download our free eBook, Making a Ring: Jewelry Making Guide and Free Projects to Create Your Own Rings. Whether you are creating your own ring or making custom ring designs for others, you’ll find the instructions in each of these three projects will help you get the size and style right while learning everything you need to know about ring-making in this free, exclusive guide.