A busy week this week with another fun course at Central St Martins.

This time it’s wax carving for jewellery making, which I am doing partly for jewellery making, so I can make my own charms, components, cabochons, findings etc but mainly for making medals.

We’ve begun the week learning the basics and so have started with a ring.

The day starts with lots of drawing, planning and measuring which is all a bit nerve-wracking as I’m used to beading when I can add or remove to my hearts content. Being exact right from the start and this having an impact later on is scary!

But I persevere and from my large block of wax (weighing 60g) over the course of the day a nice looking rings soon appears and I work hard on removing wax and refining the shape until it gets down to my target weight of 1.5g.

When this will be cast in silver it will be over ten times heavier so every shaving removed now is important.

I finish the day sitting for hours (well, it seemed like it anyway) rubbing the piece with steel wool to get it as smooth as possible and perfecting the point at the top of the ring.