My jewelry journey started more than ten years ago, in another country, in a different world, with me living a pretty different life.
One of the things that never changed — is that I’m a keeper of things, especially things related to arts and crafts.
So, ten years later, I found an ingot in my stash that looked like silver, but it was stored in a little Ziploc bag. The bag indicated that this was some special kind of silver that I had deliberately put aside from everything else, and that it was something I was supposed to remember. But I did not. I thought, oh, it’s probably just some scraps I remelted, a perfect thing to use while trying out a new ring shape — a tree branch, if it fails, I’ll just put it back to the Ziplock.
So I rolled the ingot, sawed the shape of a tree branch shank, and formed it into a ring. Then, when I tried soldering it together, part of the shank just fell off. It was bizarre. I had worked with silver for years. I knew how it felt. To me, this looked and felt like regular silver, maybe with a bit more copper. So why did part of my ring suddenly decide to melt away?
Anyway, I was so in love with the shape and how the ring had turned out that I was dedicated to saving it. I fitted a stone into the segment of the ring that had fallen off and tried again. And once again, it tried to run away from me when I heated it up to soldering temperature. This time, however, I managed to solder everything together with the kind of temperature control I didn't know I was capable of without any more parts of the ring dripping off.
I was completely puzzled. What was I doing wrong? Why was this thinh behaving like this? And then I remembered. This wasn’t silver scraps that I had melted, it was solder! Silver solder that I had made with my teacher during my very first year of studying jewelry making. I didn't quite like how it behaved, so I put it aside, intending to melt it down and do something with it later.
So this is my mystery ring made out of solder.
Despite the rather questionable circumstances of its creation and despite being made from a weird concoction of silver, copper, and zinc I like it so much that I decided it still deserves to live with a person who will hopefully like it just as much.