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As far as accessorizing goes, I’m going to make more of an effort. When I realized that a whole heck of a lot of my jewelry is packed away ready for me to live in another state, I’ve decided to start DIYing up a big jewelry wardrobe for myself. First up? How about a ring or two?
Now in this tutorial you will learn something about me. I have big ass sausage fingers. It’s just the way I roll, I guess. It’s always been that way! It doesn’t matter if I am wearing a size 2 or a size 10 or anything in between, my sausage fingers remain!
For this project you will need:
- Jewelry wire – I used 20 gauge
- Jewelry/ring mandrel (or a similarly sized marker, or other cylindrical thing to your finger)
First off I knew I wanted my ring to fit on my left index finger is where I wanted to wear my new ring but I had no clue at all what size that would be. Now you can wrap a string around your finger or whatever to size it but I was going at this solo. So I grabbed some beading wire and a crimp bead. I ran both ends of the wire into the crimp bead to form a circle.
Placing the loop around my finger I used pliers to crimp the bead at the correct space.
Boom! And that’s the size of my big ol’ pointer sausage finger.
Slid onto your mandrel to gauge the size you need. Now my mandrel came from Walmart for $5. It gets the job done but for about $7 you can get a similar mandrel and a set of ring sizers to meaning you don’t have to bother with my wire and crimp bead method at all!
Now you now know that my fingers are little fatties all of the time but sometimes things get a bit cray cray and they swell up like Violet freaking Beauregarde. So I tend to make my rings 1/2 to 1 size larger than I need when my fingers are “normal”. Otherwise I get to cut rings off and all sorts of craziness!
If you have no such problem, start your ring on the size you need. Keep a tail of an inch or two and then start going to town wrapping around the mandrel (or magic marker or whatever you’re using).
Keep wrapping until you get the amount you desire. This looks like a lot bunched together, but when I spread it out it will not be so thick.
Slide the wire off of your mandrel carefully and trim up the wire as it comes off of the spool.
Take your tails and wrap around the bundle trying to make sure you don’t accidentally re-size the loops in the process making your ring too big or too small. Here my wrapping is not the greatest but I’m going for you being able to see what is going on. Aim to get your loops closer together for a smoother surface.
Use nippers to trim any excess wire as close as you can so that it doesn’t stick you. Take a pair of pliers to smash the wire you wound up around down nice and flush.
Fan the ring out AFTER you wrap your ring up nice and tidy-like. Oh, and do this after as I did it before for a pic and I kind of messed it up.
And there is my ring from the side. Oh, and P.S. I don’t have moss growing on my fingers but I totally had some UNDER my fingernail from a project I finished just before. Still gross but not AS gross. (tutorial coming next week!)
There she is, my simple yet lovely wire wrapped ring. Now because jewelry wire can be stupid cheap you can make a ton of these. You can also toss any not so great attempts until you’re happy with what you’re producing.
When you get the hang of it you can bust one of these guys out in less than 10 minutes. After all, I’m a fan of the super fast jewelry dontchaknow?
