Neon Apatite Ring | Jewel School

Hey Doodle School! I'm Laura. Happy Wednesday! Thanks for being here with me this afternoon. Hope y'all are having a great day. We're going to do a statement ring today. So we're going big and bold today, or this week in general. It's really fun. It's kind of like a color block ring. It's just cool and fun. I like, I combine like all the different shapes we had. Cubes, coins, and then faceted beads, so it's fun. Let's talk about what we're using today. Today we are using the coin beads. That's our focal bead of the day. Check those out. I'm also using faceted rondelles. Those are the little gold beads on there. It's a really cool set because it comes with silver tone, rose tone, and gold tone. So those are the spacer beads that we're using. And then we're using, they're three and a half to four millimeter. They're fantastically cut, drilled, they're like micro faceted. They've got just this really cool faceting on them that's kind of diamond faceting. They've got great drill holes. They're just fun. They're kind of like a pillowy cube a little bit. Wire, we are using, I'm using 22 gauge to make the ring. I like 22 gauge for rings. I do a little bit like heftier of a shank with the 22 gauge. I just think it's a little easier on our hands, a little easier to work with. And then we're going to use 26 gauge to wrap the coin in that halo, that color-blocked halo with the cubes and the faceted beads. Tool-wise, I've got a flush cutter, I mean, a chain nose plier and a flush cutter, and I've got my mallet and my ring mandrel. I borrowed this from Susan's desk. Without further ado, let's make a ring. Sometimes I use 20 gauge, but I really have gotten to where I prefer 22 gauge with a ring. I just think it tightens up better. You can work hard in 22 gauge, you know, just as much as your 20 gauge, so you can get it hard and it will retain its shape. I just think it's a little bit easier to work with when it comes to making a ring, so don't be afraid to bump down in your gauge to 22 if you have it. Anytime we have 22 gauge, I'm like, give me that, because there are a lot of beads that 20 gauge won't fit through, but 22 gauge will, and it's heavy enough that it still feels like a foundation-type wire. So you want to make sure you've got 22, and then 26, same way. It's thicker, it's heavier than 28, but it's thin enough to where it can do a lot of the things that you do with your 28 gauge. Two kind of odd sizes that I don't know why they're odd. To me, they're better than the other gauges, but, I mean, every gauge has its place. But I love those gauges. So we're going to drop our bead down onto the middle of our wire here. I cut myself about two feet of wire, and then we're just going to crisscross these. This is going to help. This is an important step that a lot of people skip, but you want to crisscross your bead down there at the bottom, and then we're going to pull it back apart. This is going to give you these little shoulders, those wire shoulders. It's going to help your bead sit flat on the ring. Sometimes, especially if whatever your bead you're using has a dome or any kind of shape to the bottom, like it's not super flat, it's going to want to sit cockeyed on your finger or on the ring, and giving it these shoulders in advance kind of helps stabilize that and keep it sitting flat where you want it. So make sure you're not skipping that part. So we're going to go down to the size that we want. I also find that with 22-gauge wire, you can work at the size. Like with 20-gauge wire, you have to work a little bit heavier, or I mean bigger in size, and then it shrinks down and then you stretch it out. But 22 seems to land still where you want it to. So we're going to wrap around our ring shank a couple times. And like I said, I beef up my shank when I'm using 22-gauge, so I give it several wraps. And then we're just going to come. So we've got it pulled nice and tight around the ring shank. And here are our tails. And we're just going to twist a couple times. Whoops. Try not to let go, but if you do, it's OK. I wrap like twice. And that's kind of a personal preference thing, but I like two little wraps there. Now we're going to slide this off, holding everything in place. And then we're going to finish off these tails here. Just wrap them really gently around your ring shank, making sure that you're not overlapping like I did. We want this to lay nice and flat there. And again, on this side, we're going to come around and just wrap that. Give yourself a nice, flat, even, neat coil there. Or a little cockeyed. So here we are. I like to pull my slack, so I'm going to go in with my chain nose pliers, and I'm just going to give that a tug until it breaks my wire. Same thing on this side. Just roll it. Pull your slack out. See how much wire I got pulled there? See how it's like curled up? That's like how much slack I was able to pull out. So there really is a lot. And we're going to eliminate some of that as we stretch it back out. But it's super important in a ring is making sure you get as much slack pulled out as you can, because you don't want it to stretch out later. And then we're just going to stretch this back down the ring. Just keep hammering really gently. Now we're going to pop this off, and we're going to flip it around. We want to make sure that we're always stretching from the other direction, too. That way you don't have a tapered shank. So we want to stretch all the sides out evenly. And this is really work hardening your ring, but it's also tightening it up so that, again, it doesn't stretch out while you're wearing it. All right. Pretty, huh? She's pretty just like she is. But we're going to jazz it up a little bit. We're going to add a halo. So we're going to cut like a foot and a half-ish of our 26 gauge wire. And, OK, you see how that wire that's going up into the bead right there. I'm going to try to wrap right around there. So I'm going to pull my end through there. Give myself a couple wraps. One more time through, and then we'll be good to go. All right. So we've got a nice, sturdy wrap there around that shank. Trim that tail off, and just tuck that in. All right. Now we're going to string some beads. So we're going to do some cube beads halfway around. And if you want, if you don't like the color blocking, you can do a full halo of either one of these. But I just thought it was cool, and it gives you that little flash of metallic. I love any time I can do a little color blocking. Maybe more than I need. Yep. So I used 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 cubes to come halfway around my ring. So then we're going to take our wire, and we're that goes through the bead. We're going to do a loop through that just one time. And that's just going to kind of stabilize our halo right where we want it. So get that pulled nice and tight on there so that your coins aren't, or your cubes aren't moving. And now we are going to add some faceted beads. And it just was like another shape, another size, just another way to add a little bit of visual interest to the ring to do that. I just love the way these look when they come around the ring. That's just cool, right? So cool. OK, how many did I get? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. All right, so now holding that tight, we're going to come back through there. We'll just make sure we're pulling it as tight as we can get it so that those, you don't want a bunch of slack up there. You don't want like a ton of movement because that just kind of opens the door for like a breakdown in your wire underneath. So as tight as you can get this little section, the better. It's kind of giving me like a little bit of a sunflower vibe sort of, but in reverse. Or I don't know. Andrew said, Andrew sees it. OK, so now we're just going to take this wire and we're going to come down our ring shank just a little bit. And we're just going to follow the wrap that we've already made with our 20 gauge wire. So we're just going to kind of, we're really going to lay this wire down in between the coils. So I want the, I want 26 gauge coils down in between my 20 gauge coils. And it's just going to, they're going to lay down like in the little kind of a channel between the coils. So we're going to come down the side of that ring and just finish that off. And then we are done. So we're just going to grab our chain nose pliers and we're going to grab down at the base of that 26 gauge wire and we're going to roll. We're going to pull our slack out. I'm probably going to be able to pull quite a bit out. So I do this nice and, there we go, slow until my wire breaks. And then I know that I've gotten as much slack out of there as I'm probably going to get. Cool, huh? Hey guys, thanks for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed today's demo. If you need any of the tools and supplies that we used today check out the links in the description below. And while you're down there, I want to know what you think about this color combo. Let me know in the comments and don't forget to like, subscribe and ring that bell so you don't miss any future videos. Bye y'all.