I am a lover of jewellery. I always have been. I think I probably get it from my Mum, who as long as I can remember, has always been very subtly adorn with classy jewels. I am definitely a more refined wearer of jewellery these days but in my twenties I was obsessed with a bit of bling. Big, bold, colourful pieces, mostly necklaces but always rings. I love rings the most. Whenever I go into shops I always go straight for the rings and torture myself as I just want to buy it all, but good jewellery costs money. I've discovered Wolf and Badger an online shop with the most beautiful pieces. Arggghhhhhhh, get me off it.
So, one solution? Make my own bling ring! The Workbench was started by jewellers Katie and Kirstie, who want to run affordable handcrafted jewellery workshops in different venues all over London and the rest of the UK. Currently they do silver, gold and rose gold ring workshops. They often do them at Drink, Shop and Do - a cool café/bar in Kings Cross that I've been wanting to go to for ages as it often does classes, events and fun things to do.
The venue is cute. Its colourful, slick and modern and at the back is a lovely little room where I found myself a few weeks ago, feeling hopeful and intrigued about how I would be making my own shit-hot, hand-designed silver ring. I was quite surprised how many people were in there, around 25, all with a smart little ring kit by their seat consisting of branded placemat, pencil, thimble, knife, pad, some sandpapers and a gaudy blue plastic wax ring that looked like something you might win at a funfair.
So there are some metal ring workshops where you actually get to work on metal but this one is rather different. You actually mould and create the shape of the ring you want from the giant blue, bling wax ring and then Katie and Kirstie take it away to be cast in metal and then send you your shiny new finger bling in the post. Obviously I knew this so I did prepare and find some existing ring designs that I liked. There was also a little dish of rings going round for people to look at, of various colours, shapes and designs for inspiration.
Everyone seemed very excited and ready to dive in. There were also free, fruity cocktails to help us with the creative process, yum. Before we started we had to measure up our big, blue wax rings to fit our fingers. Then, Katie and Kirstie gave a little intro and talked through the process and how to get the best out of our work. It was then simply a case of using the small carving knife to very slowly start carving slivers off the wax. Kirstie and Katie gave us little nuggets of advice and told us to carve on the edges rather than the flat of the ring and to try and keep it all balanced. Basically, it was a case of little by little and less is more with the help of some drawings and marker pens.
Everybody just got on and was beavering away very quickly. I definitely had an idea of what I wanted to create but I think a problem for me was that I had two very different designs and was totally flummoxed about which one to concentrate on and I think I stressed myself out a bit too much, feeling very novice about the whole thing. Katie and Kirtie were very good at getting around the tables and chatting to everyone individually, but selfishly I was craving attention and wanted someone to guide me through the process. Something I know about myself is that I'm a very visual person and as such, need visual clues and pointers to guide me in the right direction. So I think I panicked a bit and ended up snapping one side of my ring, which just flustered me even more! It wasn't too much of a disaster though and Kirstie very calmly came to my rescue and moulded some extra wax onto the ring for me.
Both Katie and Kirstie were super helpful and passionate about everybody's designs but I did feel like there were just a few too many people in the room. Maybe it was just because I needed a bit more hand-holding but from my experience of workshops (and there is a lot of it!) I felt like perhaps 10-15 people would have been better. However, with the workshops being a rather reasonably priced £59 (considering you have a 2 hour lesson, free cocktail and get a solid silver ring out of it, plus all of Katie and Kirstie's time) they told me that they have to have that many to even make a small fee on the work that they do.
Even though I had a little bit of anxiety during the workshop, I still think its a really fun and creative thing to do, especially for large groups - Katie and Kirstie also do private events and home visits, so it could be a "craftily" different thing to do for a get-together. Plus, you do get a silver ring out of it and even though I thought I had made a total buffoonery mess out of my ring, a couple of weeks later, it came out looking pretty slick. I'm wearing it right now!
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