This month Rio Grande, one of my favorite jewelry suppliers, posed the question, “What’s on your workbench this month?” Since the best answer wins a prize, I thought I’d give it a try. Here’s my entry:

I like to have a bunch of projects going at once, but the thing I am most focused on this month is using mokume as a writing surface.

This picture is a sample for a set of rings I am making. The mokume was prepared by soldering sheets of copper and silver together then annealed and rolled many times until the layers were laminated together.

I have a beautiful rolling mill that I got many years ago from Rio Grande. I call him Durston. I always protect his rollers with cardboard, which makes for some interesting paper scraps.

After rolling I used a chasing tool with a chiseled edge to form letters in the sheet. I had to reverse the letters so that they would appear the right way on the face of the piece.

Initially I was thinking about using letter stamps, but they weren’t making a crisp enough outline. Also, not every letter can be reversed.

After the letters were bumped out on the mokume, the fun of revealing them began. I used a small flat file to begin with, then switched to a square one.

It didn’t look like much until I took my torch to it. Then the colors popped! I love techniques like this, when you see your results for the first time, it’s like Christmas morning.

This piece of mokume is going to be made into a ring. The letters U and R will be stamped onto other pieces of metal and then those will be soldered onto the ring. When it is complete it will read, “U R mine.”

There are going to be two versions of this ring. One is as described above and the other is a set of two rings attached with a small chain with U R on one ring and Mine on the other.

I didn’t win the contest 🙁  but I have continued working on my new technique. Neither of these rings can be worn on the finger, there is really too much exposed copper. However, they can be suspended from a chain like a charm.