Ring ring, hello?

Life keeps changing, the world keeps moving and I keep learning. I’ve been unemployed for half a year now. Even though I prepared for this beforehand, unemployment brings constant lessons in resilience to my life. Today, instead of describing the difficulties, I’d like to share one thing that I very much appreciate about unemployment. When I was working, I used to spend my weekends out of the town, in different countries or simply staying at home. I rarely went out to explore Zürich, small villages around the lake or shops in my neighborhood. This year, with a lot of free time, I managed to connect to my neighborhood in many unexpected ways and feel that joy of discovering something new. Here are some examples:

• Regular visits to an old man on a wheelchair.
• Regular meetups of Death salon at a cemetery.
• Regular meetups of my unemployment support group in a nearby bar.
• Discovering an amazing ramen restaurant.
• Discovering hand-made fresh mochis in a Chinese store.
• Discovering a Turkish store with cheap watermelon and plenty of Greek food.
• Discovering a pottery studio and making myself a silver ring.

The credit for the last item on my list goes to my wonderful ex-colleagues, who gave me a ring-making workshop as a parting gift. It took me a while to find a free slot; in the end I booked it for a Friday evening in August. On purpose, I didn’t do any research beforehand, even though I was very curious after reading the workshop description.

I was the first one to arrive in a brightly lit room. Lüt studio makes pottery and jewelry a teaches people new techniques, which is exactly why I ended up here. Have you ever heard about silver clay? It’s a mix of silver particles and an organic binder, that behaves like regular clay rather than metal. The clay properties allow hobbyists to create silver jewelry without the need for silversmith skills.

Our goal for the evening (~3 h) was to create a personalized silver ring from silver clay.

I was warmly welcomed by the instructor Selena, a half-Swiss and half-US citizen from Kansas, with a background in arts. Five more people showed up for the workshop and we started things quickly. Looking at a clay piece in front of me, I found it hard to believe that I would end up with a real silver ring in the end. At first, we chose the correct size from model rings. Our clay ring should be two sizes bigger to account for the shrinkage during drying and material loss. We added a post-it on a wooden stick with variable diameter and drew lines indicating the location of the ring.

Selena offered us a box full of stones to choose from. This was an optional decoration for the ring at an extra cost (~5 CHF per piece). The next step happened very fast, because the room was quite hot and we had to prevent the clay from forming cracks during the process. We took the prepared chunk of clay, rolled it into a thin strip, placed it on the wooden stick and started shaping the final ring with many available tools. We had to make sure that the clay was moist enough, but not too wet. While some people were really creative and made a wavy ring for example, I opted for something simple and elegant for the first time. My ring was decorated with three blue zirconia crystals because they had the highest contrast with silver in my opinion.

When everyone was ready with sculpting, we made a circle, held our wooden sticks in front of us and one of us was drying the rings with a heat gun. People from the outside curiously slowed down to watch our little seance. When Selena approved, we removed the rings from the sticks and left them on a hot plate. Finally, the time has come to relax a bit with a glass of wine and get to know each other.

The most interesting part of the workshop followed next. Since silver clay is basically silver particles with an organic glue, we took a crème brûlée torch, lighted the ring on fire and burned the glue. Then we kept the ring at 800 degrees for 2 minutes to fuse the silver together.

A strong orange glow from behind the gemstones indicated the correct torch temperature and brought flashbacks from the Lord of the Rings.

The last step was polishing the surface with Dremel. As soon as the first oxidized layer went off, the dull white ring showed its full splendor. Polishing took quite some time as we slowly decreased the size of the brush. These fine adjustments made a barely noticeable effect on an already amazing product. I am very proud of my creation and the workshop is highly recommended.

Since I don’t wear rings, I felt a bit sorry for this one to end up on my jewelry shelf collecting dust. However, this is not what happened. As soon as I took the ring off, I kind of missed it. I had it off for a week, then we happily reunited again. There is something about it that gives me power in stressful situations. I touch it, I play with it, I look at it… One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.