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Five (or more) Golden Rings 💍💍💍💍💍

I thought you might like to hear about my latest obsession and see what I’ve been working on: rings!

To call this my “latest” obsession might be a little bit misleading. I’ve been wearing the heck out of these brass rings since I first discovered the supplies, and I’m not really even sure how long ago that was. At least five years.

Ok, I just dug through my photos and found this picture from May 2019, when I made my first batch. So there’s your answer. 5.5 years.

But my source for the findings has always had a limited size range, somewhere between size 6 and size 9. I’m lucky that the 1/2-inch-wide style I love is roughly a size 8, and a pretty good fit for the ring finger on my right hand (especially if I employ a tiny bit of masking tape on the inside of it on cold days when my fingers are skinnier). But I’ve often had requests for larger sizes, that I sadly couldn’t fulfill.

So, I’ve been steadily cranking out 1/2-inch size 8 rings for the last few years, dropping one in my personal collection every time I come up with a design that matches my clothes. And I might have continued that way forever, if I hadn’t stumbled upon a new source for ring findings.

This new source doesn’t make the 1/2-inch-wide rings. They make 5/16-inch-wide rings, which are also very nice, and which I have gotten before from my previous source, but only in size 6.5 and size 9. This source has them available in sizes 7 through 10. More variety! Nice! And I went back to my original source and asked if they could make a bigger version of the size 9s I had gotten from them in the past, and they sent me some big old size 11s!

So, now I am basically swimming in ring findings, in a bunch of sizes. And I’m so obsessed right now, that I am considering also buying a bunch of 3/16-inch findings in all of the sizes, too. They’re in my cart. Somebody stop me.

[Edited, 5 hours later: I bought them. The seller sent me a 10% off coupon, so what else could I do? not buy them? 🤪]

Care for some unsolicited insight into your pal Lisa Clarke? There are two motivators that drive me to make things:

  1. I really want the thing for myself
  2. I have found out that the supplies for the thing come in X number of varieties and I want to MAKE THEM ALL for the sake of completeness

With these rings, both motivators are behind the wheel right now. They have basically doomed me to sit here making more rings than I could possibly sell in my lifetime!

On the plus side, I bought this trinket dish recently from The Clay Garage, and I now have more room for my personal collection of rings to grow. Because it’s clear that I am going to need more of these for myself, right? Of course 😁

I’ve been thinking, as much as I personally like the exuberant kaleidoscopic Jubilee designs, I need to make some more subdued designs, like the tiny flowers of the Calico Cane. At my recent craft show, I saw that shoppers gravitated to those simpler designs. Simpler to look at, though, doesn’t necessarily mean simpler to make.

I spent hours last weekend trying to simplify the making of a Calico cane. For one attempt, I used an extruder. I was hoping to keep it from being a tedious process of rolling out more than seventy tiny snakes. But all I managed to do was end up with one ugly cane that I hate, and another cane that I like, but whose method of construction was not any less annoying than the original method. So, I either have to resign myself to the old way, or keep thinking about it. Because I don’t want to abandon the idea. I like the Calico design, and so do a lot of other people. I just want to make it less of a slog to produce.

Where am I even going with this? I don’t know 😁 Have you missed these pointless stream-of-consciousness articles from me? I’m getting a real “Polka Dot Cottage 2008” vibe from this post, LOL.

Anyway… if you have any opinions about anything I’ve just said: ring sizes, ring widths, exuberant patterns versus subdued ones, obsessive behaviors, whatever, feel free to leave a comment. I’d like to know what you think 😁

Oh, and hey, I’m a lighting fast shipping machine these days, so if this post made you think of your Aunt So-and-So who loves unabashedly colorful rings, and who wears somewhere between a size 6.5 and an 11, and who you still don’t have a Christmas gift for, check this out. I’ve got you covered 😜

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