A wide version of my earlier white oak bands; this one in 18K yellow gold. I love how this ring turned out; these leaves make for such an awesome design on rings. Pretty soon the neighbor’s oak tree is going to dump about 17 metric tons of these puppies all over my roof/yard, and that will be a very different kind of awesome.

Many more pics after the click! Continue reading →

Oh hello! Did summer happen? Because I can barely remember it for the blur of activity and happenings and craziness that consumed it (and me). We had tons of family come visit us, went camping about fifty times, basked in the insanely hot (for Portland) weather, and it pretty much took me twice as long to get any of my orders completed. My clients were extraordinarily gracious about my slowness (thank you!!). On top of it all, we moved both house & studio across town to cut down on commutes. I can’t believe how much crap we have, and yet we still have to go to the store to buy things like a trash bin for the bathroom.

On to more interesting stuff: here is a ring I finished a couple of months ago. 14K rose gold tidepool-motif band with anemonies, a sea star, rockweed/seaweed, a hermit crab, sand dollars… I had so much fun carving this ring.

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One of my oldest friends from when I was a kid got married recently and I got to make their rings! Forget-me-nots in 18K yellow gold with tiny 1.5mm stones in the flower centers and a single larger stone. His band had a pared-down version of the design intaglio-carved onto a wider band + a couple of flush-set stones.

I have no idea why I haven’t yet done forget-me-nots, because it makes for an awesome design motif.

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Rose and butterfly eternity ring in 18K rose gold. More photos after the click: Continue reading →

This was a hugely fun one to design & carve: the scattered and fossilized remains of a dinosaur onto a ring! One thing that never ceases to amaze me is that they existed over a spread of like 160 million years. The Velociraptor was a relatively recent species, at a measly 75 million years old (compared to oldsters who date back to 230 million years).

Velociraptor battling (winning, I daresay) a Protoceratops. A dinosaur (the Protoceratops, that is), incidentally, that some historians speculate might have been behind the origin of the griffin myths. They think that well-preserved fossilized skeletons of the dinosaur were found by Scythian gold miners in central Asia, who then traded with the Greeks. Stories of griffins emerged right about the time the two groups made contact.

More photos around the band here: Continue reading →

Tiny figure of Jesus surrounded by ten roses; 18K gold. The ring measures only maybe 8-9mm in width, so that is one wee Jesus. This was an extremely challenging ring for me to carve, mostly because the figure is so incredibly tiny. I felt at times like my eyeballs were going to pop out of my head. I think it turned out really well. Human figures are really fun to carve, and I need to do more soon.

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Strandbeests are giant, lightweight kinetic sculptural animals that creator Theo Jansen builds on the beach. They are propelled by the wind and move with an aliveness that is fascinating and also extremely eerie (video). I like to think that these giant creatures roam the Northern beaches until the wind and weather beats them down into a pile of twigs and bits of thread, but I assume they are eventually dis-assembled or moved to museums or something.

I’m not cool enough to make a kinetic ring that cruises the strand, but I used abstract elements of the strandbeests’ sails and architecture to create a pair of wedding bands: 14K gold with a deep cognac rose-cut translucent diamond. I think they turned out pretty cool! (more pics after the click Continue reading →

I carved this squid to match my original 8mm-wide squid. It is 4mm wide, a wee delicate little thing!

Those tiny suckers nearly did me in.