Made By Hand contemporary craft fair takes place each year in Cardiff City Hall. It's a huge affair! Hundreds of exhibitors showing off exquisite crafts and also there is a lovely range of workshops and masterclasses to take part in.
This is my first visit to the Fair and I chose to take part in the 'Design and Carve a Silver Ring' workshop. It was a lovely, small workshop with 8 people taking part in total. All materials and equipment were supplied. We each had our own workmat with the basic tools we were going to be using. I had no idea what to expect before the workshop, I knew we would be carving using jewellers wax but what on earth is jewellers wax? Think I was expecting a cross between plasticine and play doh but in actual fact it was more like a piece of hard plastic. Here is my mat!
That blue 'thing' is the jewellers wax. The other 'tools' include a craft knife, two types of sandpaper, a thimble so's I wouldn't slice my fingers with the knife, and a tealight. Must admit when I sat down initially I couldn't work out why there were so many lighters but then when I saw the tealight, the penny dropped. The jewellers wax is hard, really hard, so to make it more pliable you can hold it over the tealight.
To start with you have to take the jewellers wax and place it on a very phallic looking tool - I have no idea what the official name is so I'll just call it the ring sizer. There's so much potential here for double entendres! One 'side' of the ring sizer has a really sharp blade so you basically just keep turning the wax on the sizer until you have a ring which fits.
Once you were happy with the size, you basically got going with the craft knife and started carving away. The flat bit
at the top took a lot of work to fashion into a curve but holding it over the tealight really helped. I really enjoyed the carving/whittling bitty but to be honest it was quite difficult to know when to stop. I was desperately trying to keep it all even but if some parts were thinner than others you had to keep going to try and even it up. I did get a bit too carried away here and my piece of wax actually split, but thankfully Maggie, the tutor was able to solder it back together.
Because I now had a ring with a pretty delicate part that kind of gave me inspiration for what to do next. I was going to melt some extra wax on top to create a fake stone!!! They had previously discarded bits of wax that you could play with - thankfully there were tongs that you could use.
Eventually, it started to take shape. I was quite happy with the shape and it did look like a ring. Amazeballs!
So, once I was happy with it, I handed it over and after labelling them, Maggie sent all our 'creations' away to the jewellers quarter in Birmingham so they could cast the rings in solid silver. We were told it could take two to three weeks and yep, today, I got my ring back through the post. I'd quite like to describe it as rustic, organic and from the 'naive' school. Stewart kind of said that it looked like something you'd get out of a Christmas cracker, a bit of silver with a blob on top. Well, I made this, it's shiny, and I am perfectly happy with my bit of silver with a blob on top.
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