Wire Ring Making With Eva Sherman: 5 Tips for Making Stylish Wire Rings and More
I love antiquing, junking, estate sale shopping, treasure hunting in stores and in nature. In doing so, I seem to discover an endless supply of things that I think would make a great ring–vintage beads, buttons, coins or tokens, shells, orphan earrings, seed pods, Roman glass, beach glass, and more. What I don’t have, however, is the big box of cash it would take to buy enough silver to make all those rings! Not to mention the time to make them all. Fortunately there’s a quicker, easier, and more affordable way to make rings with just about any found object: wire.
If you’ve got some wire, you can make rings! Quick, affordable rings to showcase all those found objects and treasured bits that you think would be just right for jewelry. And even if you don’t have the same found-object “problem” I have, you can make stylish rings using wire alone. Eva Sherman’s wire ring making videos, Coiled Wire Rings, Variations on a Wire Flat-Spiral Ring, Fast, Fun & Fashionable Rings, and Wire Bezeled Stone Rings, show how to make more than a dozen different rings using wire alone or with crystals and beads.
Here are just five of the many handy jewelry-making tips I gathered from just watching parts of Eva’s wire rings videos. Number five is my favorite–who knew?
5 Tips for Making Wire Rings and Other Wire Jewelry
1. When annealing wire, look for a dull red. You don’t want to get to a cherry-red state when annealing, because at that point, the metal is starting to melt. This can quickly lead to ruin if you’re not careful, especially when working with silver. If you have trouble seeing the shades of red in the hot metal, dim the lights.
2. Be sure to dry metal jewelry projects-in-progress after quenching or pickling and before using them with your steel tools to prevent rust. Rust on your tools (and on your projects, when it transfers over to them) can be a bigger nuisance than you might think.
3. Use plastic or wooden tongs when you dip and remove metal in liver of sulfur. Metal tongs can mar the metal and remove the patina where they touch each other; also, in some cases, different metals can react with the liver of sulfur solution and affect your patina.
4. When making wire rings, keep both hands free by securing your ring mandrel in a ring mandrel clamp. Then you’re free to hold the ring in one hand and hammer with the other, or twist wire with both hands, etc. Somehow I’ve made wire rings and other rings for years without knowing about these little clamps! If you have a mandrel already and are looking to buy a clamp, make sure the mandrel you have will work with the clamp you’re considering before you buy.
The Most Fascinating Thing About Metal
5. Ever wonder why your metal (copper in particular) has a milky or matte appearance after pickling? I always assumed it was just residue from the pickle that I needed to clean off, but I learned from Eva’s video what it actually is and why it won’t just wash off. When the hydrochloric acid in pickle cleans or “pulls off” the firescale from the metal, it also pulls the ends of the copper or other metal molecules up into a vertical position. This is the same upright-molecule situation that makes fired metal clay dull when it’s fresh from the kiln, before burnishing. To remove the dullness, you have to scrub the metal surface with steel wool or a brass brush to burnish and flatten those molecules back down where they can again reflect light and shine like you expect metal to do. Tumbling also works.
Learn to Make Wire Rings with Eva Sherman
See these tips in action and learn so much more about making wire rings when you order Eva Sherman’s wire ring-making videos. The 13 rings DVD compilation was so popular, it’s sold out–but the individual project videos are still available and so informative.
You’ll learn:
- how to use a common hardware store drill to create perfect wire coils (for wire rings or other jewelry projects and designs)
- how to get comfortable with a torch slowly and easily when you use it for annealing and making balled head pins
- how to get the right size in wire rings that have a tendency to grow or shrink during the making process
- and so much more.
With multiple ring projects and hours of instruction, you’ll finish these videos with the ability to whip up all the wire rings you want, anytime an occasion or your stash calls for it!
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