Designing the Peony Ring
The Peony Ring is based on the Peony Charm, a design originally created as a custom project for my best friend:
To create a ring that would complement the charm without being exactly alike, I looked at lots of peonies, studying their petals, buds, and leaves to see which elements would best complement the existing design. In early spring, I brought home a gorgeous "Coral Sunset" variety, and took photographs daily as it bloomed, paled, and eventually wilted.
For a while, I found it difficult to increase the number of elements involved in the design — I worried that too many parts would look confusing and cluttered at a small scale. To solve this, I turned to traditional textiles and embroidery patterns, which I've always found to be especially good at translating complex forms into recognisable motifs. The image below is from a book called Patterns and Poetry, depicting silk-embroidered peonies on a Noh costume from the Edo period.
Sculpting the Peony Ring
To create the Peony Ring, I used a mould to replicate the flower from the Peony Charm. The replica is made of blue wax here:
Then, drawing inspiration from embroidery motifs, I carved a new leafy ring band from green jeweller's wax. The size and arrangement of the leaves are designed to frame and balance the floral focal point, as well as providing lots of texture for sparkle. The blue wax replica and green wax band are attached together with molten wax.
Working with moulds for lost wax jewellery
If you're not familiar with lost wax casting, it looks something like this:
Every original wax model is destroyed as soon as it is cast into metal, which means that a single carving can only be cast into a single piece of jewellery. To create multiple pieces of jewellery with the same design, we have to use a mould.
The image below shows four replicas of my Peony Charm design, one of which was used as the focal point of the Peony Ring.
From left to right, we have:
- Mother casting in brass (the very first casting of the Peony Charm)
- Blue wax replica
- Raw gold casting
- Polished gold casting
A mould is made by pouring liquid silicone around an object (in this case, the mother casting of the Peony Charm). Once set, the mould can be used to create wax replicas.
To create a wax replica, the two halves of the mould are placed together, and liquid wax is injected into the cavity. Once the wax replicas are retrieved from the mould, they can be cast directly in metal, or combined with handcarving to create new designs.
Since the handcarving process is very labour-intensive, I almost always have a mould made for the first casting of an original design. This allows me to build upon the existing design (or refine it, if needed), without having to start the entire carving process from scratch again.
Here's a photo of the mould for the Peony Ring, along with its mother casting (the gold ring on the left), and a wax replica (in pink wax on the right):
Learn about lost wax jewellery
For more on my studio and jewellery making process:
Thanks for reading!