New Jewelry Book

I bought this book: Mixed Metal Mainia: Solder, rivet, hammer, and wire exceptional jewelry by Kim St. Jean. I love it! It is by far the best investment in jewelry books I have ever purchased. It has gotten me over my hump in moving from just wire work and into metalsmithing. It was more than a year ago that I took a metalsmithing boot camp class at Ornamentea, and I went out and bought all of the tools and materials necessary to begin metalsmithing in my own home. But they just sat there... I would look at everything from time to time, and was truthfully unsure of where I should start and unsure of myself and my skills.

Kim's book is written at my level - I've already read it cover to cover three times and have completed project 1, a rather simple, but stylish cigar band ring.

Lucky for me, I have my own jewelry collection that always needs more pieces and friends/family that love an experimental piece as a gift. I decided to do three rings (just for extra practice) - one for me, one for a sister, and one for a friend :

I taped them down to my scrap piece of nickel silver (the left over piece from my class at Ornamentea).

After a couple of hours, I had them all sawed out. Mine was complete - I stamped "V"s on one side and "C"s on the other with "&"s going down the middle. The part that wasn't stamped, I used my ball peen hammer to add texture. My husband thought having out initials on the ring was a cute idea. I still had lots of work to do on Lauren's and Betsy's.

I decided that I did not like the "&"s down the middle, so I did Lauren's without those. Betsy and her husband have the same first initial, so I just stamped the "B"s all over the center of hers which ended up being my favorite one.

I'm ready for the next project!