This past weekend I was able to take a class on jewelry and metalworking at The Crucible in Oakland; the tuition was covered as a Christmas gift. I thoroughly enjoyed the class, and learned enough to produce the rings shown below with minimal guidance. We covered stamping, sawing, filing, rolling, soldering, and finishing;the metals we worked with were silver, copper, and brass (primarily for cost reasons, gold is even more insanely expensive than I remembered.) The first ring in the gallery involved a lot of sawing and drilling, which I still need to improve with, as well as eight hard solder joints to hold the copper bits inside the silver voids. There were additional pieces generated during the stamping and embossing tutorials, but I'll keep the post here to the rings. My only frustration with the class was how quickly I ran out of ideas. I really wish I had walked in with a pile of concepts rather than just one or two! Definitely looking to obtain some of the tooling to continue this sort of work at home, and combine it with my lapidary / faceting aspirations.
