July Four A Month - Bronze Rings, but nearly Silver!

My Four A Month Challenge pieces for July are rings!! Bronze rings to be precise - BUT they very nearly were silver rings :)

In my last blog post you will recall I showed you a stack of lovely shiny silver rings all made in fine silver using Art Clay Silver and I had planned to make four of those my FAM. However, I have also been doing a bit more experimenting and testing with the new Goldie Bronze clay and I wanted to see if I could make my usual styles of rings using that. 

DON'T PANIC - Art Clay Silver is, and I suspect always will be my absolute favourite, but with the cost of silver as high as it is, it makes a nice change to have a play with something else and expand the repertoire a little.

So these are the four rings I liked best out of the ones I made.

Stone Set Snake Ring, this has an embedded bronze prong setting to hold the stone in it which worked very well.

Sunburst Ring, a nice solid chunky ring, more suited to a man I think. I have not made many square rings but I really like the style. The design was carved in the clay state.

Spiral Ring, the texture around the band on this one is a texture I created using Scratch Foam. For more information on creating those textures have a look at this tutorial by Wanaree Tanner.

Last of the four is Stoneburst Ring. I really like this design. The textures on this are made using Rolling Mill Resource textures, and again it has an embedded bronze prong setting.

In case you are more of a silver lover here is my photo of the four rings that were going to be the Four a Month.

The ring below is called Rustic Red, and was my most favourite ring I have ever made! I was definitely going to keep it for me. The red stone is one I brought back from my trip to Japan in 2010. Luckily I brought four of these stones back because I wore this ring to the next fair I went to and sold it off my finger!

The raised setting for the stone had a lovely rustic look to it...

...with a finish that looked like it had been hammered, and the pattern around the band was made using a Rolling Mill Resource texture...

...and the stone was the most gorgeous red and sparkled beautifully.

Yep, that really was my all time favourite, but as my husband always say - no problem - just make another.

I think I will do just that ;-)

Phew that was a long post - well done and thank you if you made it this far!