Everything You Need to Know to Make Spoon Rings Like A Pro

in this video i'm going to be going over everything you need to know if you make spoon rings or silverware rings in general so let's get started [Music] so this is a very simple way to make rings but there's also a lot to it at the same time and little things that you should know before getting into it so one of the things is how do you pick your silverware so if you're going out and getting your silverware at thrift stores or anything like that make sure you bring some magnets with you and some pretty strong ones this will help you figure out if your silverware contains steel which you cannot use it is just too hard of a metal to bend into the right shape and it just doesn't really work well so if you go ahead and take your magnets and touch it to your pieces it shouldn't stick and if it does it means it's made out of steel if you look on the back there's printings and it is labeled stainless steel not everything is though some stuff will be stainless steel plated with silver and you can't use that so make sure to figure out which ones are actually steel and do not buy those or remove them if you already did so that leaves us with all these so the next thing is to check the back of them and you'll be able to see on some of them that they will actually say that they are silver plated and others will just have markings like this which usually mean that they're also plated but then there's also others that have absolutely nothing on them so the best ones that you can find are the ones that are actually stamped or say that they are sterling and they're going to be heavier like noticeably heavier than other pieces and this is a solid silver fork and this is a solid silver spoon these cost a lot more than if you got plated ones but you can do a lot more with them so if you're new to this whole jewelry thing and you don't understand what the difference between sterling silver and plated silver is sterling silver is the same stuff that is used to make jewelry and this is basically jewelry grade silver here and it is solid silver so it's silver plated it's basically a very thin layer of fine silver over the entire piece and underneath it the main percentage of this is made out of copper nickel and zinc so with that said about the plated metals you can see here that there are some darker spots and lighter spots in this and if you flip it over where i matted it down so it's easier to see on camera there's this darker area and this little bit here that is the silver plating and this is the base metal so if you over polish or anything like that you'll wear away that little bit of silver and you'll have exposed base metal which is fine as long as you tell people that it is not silver plated which also means if you're working on one of these and you start peeling up the plating i would highly suggest just polishing all the plating off to the best of your ability and just call it a day so you can see how thin that plating is right there you can't even feel the transition between the two so just be very careful when polishing because you can strip it away like i did on this i did this on purpose just to show that you can strip it down and what it looks like when you do and the rest of this still has all of its silver coating on it so if you're not 100 sure that your pieces are plated in silver and you've already tested them with the magnets to make sure that they're not steel you can do an acid test so basically you can take an edge of this you're going to want to get a testing kit and it will come with this little rubbing stone you can take the side of your piece or any spot of it that hasn't been cut or anything like that and just rub it on here it will start transferring the plating onto it if you rub too much you'll rub through your plating so it'll start to show different results and this piece right here is a piece of silver that i know is silver and i'll put it over here to show the difference you also don't have to put as much as i'm putting on here but i want you to be able to see what's going on so now that you have both those on there you're going to want to test it using one of the acids you can use the silver testing acid but it's hard to see for a lot of people and it doesn't really work that great for the most part so you can use the 18 karat gold one make sure it's only the 18 carat one though also these acids will burn your hands if you get it on them so be sure to wear gloves and be very careful and do not get it in your eyes or anything like that so before we actually do the test i'm going to rub a little bit of the cut piece of this metal here because it is a different metal inside and i'll show you what it does with that so this is very simple to use all you need to do is take one drop and put it onto your piece and you'll see that it turns a bluish color if it is actually silver it'll be like a milky bluish like a baby blue almost so that is our control silver this should be the silver plating which is turning that weird bluish white color and then the center one shouldn't do this it should just kind of dissolve like that so that's how you can figure out what your pieces are made out of and if they do have a plating or not if they are not marked do not put this directly onto your piece it will actually leave a burn mark like this right here and it will actually eat through the plating so once you're done with all the testing you can just wash this off with some soapy water and put it away so one thing that you might want to keep in mind when shopping for your silverware is how thick it is the thicker it is the harder it's going to be able to bend and if it is plated you can't really heat this to make it softer so you're kind of stuck with it how it is so this piece right here if you look at its thickest point it's 3.7 millimeters and its thinnest point is 2.35 and you could really go all the way to here you might be able to get away with a smaller bit of this but anything up in the three over the threes to almost four millimeters it's going to be very hard to bend and if you're trying to make something like this you're going to have a hard time getting it to curl down like this without scratching it up or just messing up your piece in general so you're going to want to look for something more in this range and it comes in at 2.8 at its thickest and under two or just about two at its thinnest so this is a much easier piece to actually get bend using the tools that we have if you're able to get your hands on some actual silver pieces and they are thicker like that so if you do happen to come across some actual solid silver ones and they come in being over the three millimeter mark you can still use them with no problems really mostly being because you can actually heat this up and it will anneal and become softer and easier to work with so that is one of the good things about working with actual silver and the other being that you can polish this to your heart's content and it won't lose its silver finish because the whole thing is silver but even with that said this is still usable if you wanted to use it and it can be bent still it's just a lot harder and you won't be able to really make the spirally rings using this kind you can make straight ones you just have to know where to cut so if you are making these and you need to figure out what size a person's finger is you can get some ring sizers the ring sizers basically are these little rings that have markings on them that tell you what size that would be so you just put it on your finger and see if it fits so from this you can actually measure this and get the diameter and we can go from there and figure out how much metal we actually need to make a ring that's the right size if the person isn't there and you're just making whatever sizes and you're told whatever size you need you can use a mandrel and do the same thing and measure exactly where your sizing is and it'll give you the diameter you needed all right so i'm going to show you how to get whatever size you need out of whatever piece you're using so you need to measure the thickness of this part and you're going to find that it is all over the place on its sizing but we want to kind of get a midpoint or an average let's go with 2.3 so just go ahead and take that down and then we need to add the diameter of the ring that we're going to be making so we're going to go for a si7 we measure here and it's about 17.2 so we just write that down 17.2 and we add those up which will be 19.5 5. there we go then we need to multiply that by 3.14 and that will equal 61.23 millimeters so you just need to get 61.23 millimeters of this to make a size 7 and this works with any ring or any size you're doing you just have to plug in the numbers and the reason why we multiply that by 3.14 is so we get a circle so now with your calipers all you need to do is go to that point hook the end down here and scratch a little line into here you'll see the line right there and now we need to cut it so you can cut it using a pair of these just open them up and cut you can also use bolt cutters which is way overdoing it or you can use a jeweler saw which i'm going to use i'm going to be using some nano blades and they're going to be the size 5 i'm just going to lubricate the blade and go ahead and cut through this [Laughter] so there we go and now we have a nice clean cut this is going to be a little sharp still but not nearly as sharp as if you cut it off using any of the other tools you can make that whatever shape you'd like and fix it with just a normal hand file so there we go that's all cleaned up and no longer sharp so with that done you can polish everything up now if you wanted to because you can now get to everything really easily so there we go now it's completely smooth and polished right there so that's all we need and now you need to actually round this out and make it into a ring so when it comes to making one like this you don't really have to do much measurements because it's just going to keep going and to get that one set up all we need to do is cut it off here you could just cut straight across here and then kind of grind it or use a file to round it out or make whatever shape you want or you can use a set of dividers and kind of place it down here in the center-ish area and scribe in a line just make sure that you don't move from your starting point so something like that and then you can just use your saw and cut with that and if you don't like it being that big you can always adjust these to be smaller and you can see where your point is going to be and then just draw another line so something like that so there you go and then if you need to even it up at all you can just use your file real quick and then you could just take this to the polisher and get it completely smooth all right so now for the fun part where we get to use the ring bender which you need to bolt down to something or put into a vice that is bolted down to something really sturdy because there's going to be a lot of force on this and it's going to move around so let's start with the one that's just going to be a straight ring so you'll notice all the little pieces here with all the numbers and stuff this is just the different rounding bits each one can be taken off and used to make your rings round out properly so for this particular one i'm going to be using a 16 of the metal one and a 16 of the plastic the plastic is there so it doesn't leave a bunch of marks on the outside of your ring so all you really need to do is start with one side and pull your lever and if you pull like that it will bend your piece the whole point of this is to round it out into a ring so i'm going to get a good bend like that going and then i'm going to flip it around so once you have it like this you're going to want to do the center of it to make both sides meet you'll notice it doesn't quite take the shape of the 16 that's in here there's a way to fix that is actually to take this piece out and go one size down and you'll start to make a little bit of a tighter bend so now i put a 14 in there and you can see it tightened that up but we are now off a bit here you can use this to hold it and you can use a rawhide mallet or a rubber mallet or something that's not going to scratch it and just kind of tap it down so you can see they're starting to line up a lot better and just keep working this and it should come out something like that so you need to check the size of this too so here's my mandrel we're trying to make a size 7 and it goes perfectly to a size 7. so i'm just going to put this over to the side for now and then show how to make one of the spiraled ones so i switched everything back to just being 16 all the way and we're just going to do almost exactly the same thing besides you're just going to start spiraling around so it's going to go something like this and then you're going to get to a point where you can't really go anymore and you can flip this and do it from the opposite direction so you can see it's starting to take its shape but it's still kind of all over the place you can use your mallet to move it around a little bit more to tighten it up there we go it's much more compacted it's still not 100 rounds you can see little weird bins especially over here so we're going to move this over to the smaller size again so once you have all that to your liking you can try it on your mandrel and it should be around the size seven which it stops right there if you're running into any weird like kinks or anything in it which i still have some you can put it on the mandrel itself and you can hammer it down using your rawhide mallet to shape everything a little bit better and if it becomes too big you can put it back onto the ring bender and kind of shrink it down again so with your rings done and everything you're going to want to pick a finish you can do a high polish like i did on this one you could do more of a mat like i did on this one or if you really want to go for it you can do a rainbow coating like this that i haven't seen anyone else do and i'm going to show you how to do this and it's pretty unique because you can get this nice rainbow look that being said this is the ring that we just made one of them at least it doesn't have any of the plating here so it won't become rainbow any silver part will rainbow any part that is not will turn gold or a gold color so you'll be able to see that this has blues and stuff going on because there's still silver but this top part has no silver on it anymore so it's really up to you what you're going for and what you want your look to be you can plate this using a pin plater before putting it into what i'm about to show you and i'll have links in the description to everything that i'm talking about on this video and that might be a solution for you but you're probably thinking how do you get this crazy rainbow color on well it's actually really simple and it smells really bad all you really need is this stuff which is liver of sulfur and as you can tell i'm wearing gloves because this stuff will stain your hands like a greenish yellow if you get it on them so i don't want that you're also going to need two cups of hot water so just take a little bit of your little liver sulfur and drip it into your water and use something to stir it up this will smell like rotten eggs and that's completely normal so i'm just going to take one of my rings and put it into the solution and just kind of move it around a bit and then put it into the water solution or just normal water and kind of rinse it off and make sure everything is hot and you'll end up with this interesting look and you can do this over and over again with any of your pieces you'll notice that where we cut it is nice and shiny still because that's a different metal like i was saying it will eventually turn gold if you just keep doing this but say you want your ring to just be black you would just leave it in the liver sulfur for like 10 minutes or more and then come back to it and rinse it off and it'll be black the other thing is you need to make sure your piece is clean so clean it off soap and water so there's no oil on it or anything that's another reason why to wear gloves and i did a quick polish on this one it's not made into a ring yet obviously but i'm going to show you that it doesn't take much to make this work so just that little bit already turned it gold and there we go now it's nice and rainbowed so that's pretty much everything you need to know to get started making these kind of rings and as you can see you have a lot of options and a lot of freedom to do whatever you want really so you don't have to just stick with these pieces like you can see here i made a piece out of a fork and wrapped it around i went through and cut in here because it didn't line up properly and i like how it kind of just disappears into it and this is another one just from a fork that i actually soldered together that particular one has all of its plating completely gone because as soon as i started to solder it it kind of bubbled up and fell off if you don't have one of those ring benders to make these it's not a total loss and you don't absolutely have to have one but it makes your life a thousand times easier you can use other tools you can use some pliers similar to these that are rounded and you can start getting your piece rounded use these in a hammer or you can use a mandrel and a hammer and you can be creative with it to just get the round shape but it's going to be a lot harder and because you can't heat these without destroying the plating it makes it a lot harder that being said if you get some solid silver ones you can heat them all you want and you can almost bend them by hand once you anneal them with that being said if you want to see my actual silver smithing skills and see what i can do with some actual silver ones leave a comment and let me know if you do so that's about it if you have any questions leave a comment i try to get back to all of them like this video if you've learned anything and subscribe i try to put out new videos every week other than that i'll see you guys next time bye you

Channel: GomeowCreations

Views: 185,344

Rating: 4.9258423 out of 5

Keywords: jewelry making, jewellery making, silver smith, gold smith, good jewelry teacher, basic jewelry skills, how to make a ring, DIY, do it yourself, how to, spoon ring, how to make a spoon ring, thrift flip, tiktok diy, do it yourself hobby, thrift flip home decor, tiktok diy crafts, tiktok diy compilation, jewellery making for beginners, jewelry making for beginners, jewelry making ideas, fork ring diy, spoon rings diy, jewellery making for beginners kit

Id: CMa0_Xktf7k

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 31 2021