This post encompasses many days and hours of carving. With our designs in mind, we set about getting something into the real world!
We started with a long green tub of a hard wax and cut it down to a reasonable size for a ring, but still a bit bigger. Since it’s easier to remove material than to add, everything had to start bigger than I imagined.
We knew that Miranda’s fingers were ring size 6.5, and Russ (hell, I’ll just name him…) has a piece of equipment that has ring measurements on it. We used calipers to measure size 6.5 on the ring sizer to find how how many millimeters that corresponded to. We then attached the cut piece of wax to a lathe and cut away the inside until it was that many millimeters around. We never touched the inside of the ring again!
Then the time consuming part. I (Russ went to work on other things while I did this) painstakingly cut away the sides of this green wax tube until it started to look like our design. I also used a hand drill to cut a 3mm hole in the middle for the gem, as we had decided to go with a smaller center gem at this point.
This is a photo at the end of the first day of carving. Very thick in the band, very chunky, but definitely the right direction.
End of the second day of carving. Getting thinner.
End of the third day of carving, even thinner still.
After the third day of carving, I looked at what I had created and really liked it, but was still thinking about the 3-gem design we’d thought about. The next day, we started from scratch again. This was a horrifying idea after having spent 3 days carving, but it was really interesting in that I managed to do the same amount of work in a single day!
I used a 5mm center hole this time. I don’t have any photos of this mid-step, but when I had enough room for the 5mm gem with 2 3mm gems on the edges, I didn’t like how the band looked. It was thick and chunky in order to support the 3mm gems, and I loved the curve and swoop of the original, with the band coming towards the center gem. I made a design decision and cut away the outer gems, leaving myself with only the 5mm center gem.
The first wax on the left, the second wax on the right.
The big carving was done with a Dremel to speed things up. But at a certain point you have to slow things down and start using ever smaller files to get the detail that you want.
As well, because I ended up cutting away to much (several times…) Russ showed me how to repair this. We lit a tea light and heated up a sculpting tool (which were identical to the kinds of tools we use to sculpt putty!). I applied this tool to a brick of wax to melt it, and then, similar to our puttying, applied the melted wax to the area that needed building up. I then had to re-file down the new area to match the existing structure. The problem with this process was that not only could you end up not filling the whole completely (so had to do it again), but also the new wax was a different colour from the existing wax. This caused a lot of problems for me not being able to see depth properly. I would think that the new black wax was deeper than the original green, that it was pitted or contoured in some way. I had no confidence, but Russ helped me figure out what was correct and what wasn’t.
Even with the second ring being much faster to make, it was still days of work to get it perfect. Russ wanted to make a “save point” so that we could screw up later and not have to re-do that work. The next step of the process will be familiar to anyone who has done any model casting!
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