Jennifer Culp

I jumped into the Ring a Day 2010 challenge a bit late, starting on January 10. Three hundred and fifty five rings is still a pretty big goal, and I feel like this challenge will stretch me in positive directions throughout the year.

Since making one ring each day could easily turn into a very time-consuming task, I’m trying to keep materials and processes for this project simple and use it as a way to explore outside of my usual working processes. Here’s the first week’s results:

On the 10th, I decided to jump in feet first. (It was rather late in the evening, and seemed like a great idea at the time.) My first endeavor involved electrical wire and a small piece of brass tubing. It was actually quite difficult to get the wire to stay bent into a circle that small, but I prevailed with some glue and patience.

For this one I broke out some polymer clay. A length of fine silver wire fits around the underside of the finger, and is held in place by the spheres on top. I couldn’t resist giving the larger one a belly button. This ring is surprisingly comfortable to wear. I may play with this form again in the future.

This pinky ring may be may favorite of the bunch so far. The “finger” broke off a bad cast of my own hand earlier in the year. With a couple coats of nail polish and some steel wire added to hold it to a real finger, it found a new purpose. This one looks especially creepy when worn on my corresponding left pinky finger.

The snow outside was (finally!) beginning to melt, so I figured this might be my only chance to do a snow ring. I made the sterling silver bowl and shank pretty quickly. The snowball itself had to be remade twice during the brief shooting session because it melted so quickly.

Wearing this ring was extremely unpleasant. I never considered how well sterling silver might conduct cold before; I now know that it does so very, very well. My finger almost froze off, even after I added a glove to protect my hand.

This little guy proved terrifically frustrating. I started with a swatch of faux snakeskin and a glass snake eye, and it seemed simple enough to cut a hole for the eye and sew the fabric together to make a band. Wrong! The hole I initially cut for the eye stretched too much and left a gap around the eyeball. I ended up ripping the plastic-y “snakeskin” from its backing fabric, stretching a tiny cut over the eyeball, and assembling the whole thing with superglue. Superglue was EVERYWHERE when it was finally done.

I love the way that material stretched over the eye, though. I may utilize this discovery in future.

Quick and easy. I cut the first two-and-a-half inches off my measuring tape, wound it into a circle, and secured it with a piece of thin bronze sheet folded over with pliers. I may wear this one out. I must remember that two inches are missing from the measuring tape if I use it to measure anything, however.

Today’s ring was also simple and easy. I cut a length of copper plumbing tubing off of a long tube with my jeweler’s saw. Several blades gave up their lives in an attempt to get one end to cut at an angle. I cleaned up the edges with a diamond bit, attempted to enhance the slight red tint on part of the tube with dye oxide patina (not very successfully), and gave up and pronounced it done.

This one’s very simple, but fits on the finger in an interesting way. I could actually bend my pinky and pick things up while wearing it mid-finger as shown, which is more than I expected from such skinny tubing.

Onward to next week! You can see more images of these rings at the Culp Baubles Facebook page and at my Flickr.