Yearly Archives: 2015

christmas deadline!

Hello all! As per usual, I plan to finish up all orders for a safe by-Christmas shipment around the 15th December. In order for me to have enough time to complete your rings, I’ll need to have any incoming orders finalized in the next week. I’ll be taking a couple of weeks off around Christmas to the new year, and then I’ll be back up and running.

I nearly forgot to get this posted, as it feels like Christmas is AGES away still, but yesterday afternoon I was in the local Fred Meyer grocery store, and not only did they have twinkling Christmas tree displays with spangly ornaments for sale, they had a whole section devoted to impulse buy stocking stuffers. It was a little horrifying. I noticed egg nog went on the shelves easily two weeks ago too. Didn’t that stuff never come out until mere days before Thanksgiving? I can tell I’m going to be an excellent old person, ranting about how things used to be in ye olde times.

wide white oak band

18K hand-carved oak leaf band

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.

18K hand-carved oak leaf band

Many more pics after the click! Continue reading

tidepool band

Hand-carved Tidepool band in 14K rose gold

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.

Hand-carved Tidepool band in 14K rose gold

More pictures after the click! Continue reading

melissa + oli’s wedding rings

18K forget-me-not wedding bands

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.

More pics: Continue reading

entwined snake rings

Entwined snake rings with star sapphires - 14K

I think I could carve snake rings until I was blue in the face. Here are a pair of snake wedding bands in 14K with tiny oval black star sapphires set into their mouths. I’ve never tried to set a stone on the side of a ring before, and it wasn’t all that different from normal setting, but figuring out a way to securely hold the ring solidly sideways where I could have good access for working the setting was complicated. I managed, but I have a sneaking suspicion it could have been accomplished with a bit less awkward…

Entwined snake rings with star sapphires - 14K

The original plan was to carve scales onto both snakes, but I got halfway there, and the contrast in texture just looked so nice. We decided to leave it be and I’m glad we did!

More pics after the click: Continue reading

velociraptor fossil band

Velociraptor fossil ring in 14K gold

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 protoceratops

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

crucifix + roses band

18K crucifix + rose ring

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.

18K crucifix + rose ring

More pics after the jump! Continue reading

strandbeest rings

14K carved strandbeest rings + cognac diamond

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.

strandbeest

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