c hi i'm liz thank you for tuning in to my channel making it easy with liz today we're going to make wire work rings and these are pretty basic and just some different designs and they all start out the same way this one here is just another funky uh rendition of one here's another one that i did with a washer that i hammered and put into a dapping block and made it a little bit um a little concave or or bent it in a little bit and anyway i'm going to show you how to do just a basic ring out of wire and we're going to start with this one here which is just a a little basic swirl i like to call it a cinnamon roll i'll call it a cinnamon roll with some spirals on on the sides and then i'm going to show you how to get a little little funky with your wire working okay so to begin with we're going to start off with 18 gauge soft you have to use dead soft wire because wire as you work it continues to get harder and harder stiffer and stiffer and it's called work hardening so we're going to start with 18 gauge dead soft wire i would suggest that for rings i mean you can do some fun rings with craft wire colored craft wire but it's not going to last so if you just want to make a quick ring for a for a fun night out or whatever that's fine but if you want something that's going to last do pure metals so either copper or brass or sterling silver or even silver filled that'll work well okay so what we're going to do is we're going to start with our ring mandrel big old heavy ring mandrel also known as a spousal realignment tool and we're going to you're going to take let's say i need to find out what ring size i need so take a ring that you already have and put it on the ring mandrel and these are ones with markings and this one falls at around seven okay so you're going to want to figure out what size you want and then you're going to um take your your wire now a lot of videos or a lot of a lot of instructions will tell you to start on the size that you want but what i like to do is i like to start at the very top of the mandrel because then what i'll do is i'll tighten it up there and then i'll scooch it on down to where i want it and then that way it won't move if you move it down if i move that down to a seven the chances of me bumping it down even bigger are are pretty great because i'll be working on it and i'm not paying attention to what i'm doing okay so we're gonna start up here and we're gonna take our wire and we're gonna crisscross it okay we have it centered and we crisscross it i'm going to turn it over we're going to do a double shank and i'm going to keep my wires on there their sides here all right so this is what we this is what we have we have them side by side with it with a double shank like that alright so now what i'm going to do is i'm now going to scooch this on down i'm just going to scooch it down and what i'm going to do is i'm going to put it on the size that i want you can even go a little bit smaller because the wraps that we're going to put on this is going to move it up maybe even a whole full size so if we let's say i want a 7 so i'm gonna bring this down to a seven all right so now we have we have this and now look see that wire is not going anywhere now i can work on that without it moving on me okay so now what we want to do is we want to twist this wire in the center here so if you can brace this somehow between your legs on the table like this or in your lap it can be done so what we're going to do is we're going to grab our wire okay and we're going to give it i'm going to hold this right here like this do you got that boy is that right okay so i'm going to hold this like this and i'm just going to pull on my wire i'm going to do a quick turn like that okay so you want to make sure that your wires are nicely twisted together in one movement if they're not if one is raised a little bit you could take your rawhide mallet i'm just going to tap it like that all right so now it's just one wire is going to chase the other so now we're going to we're making our cinnamon roll so see what i'm doing here and if they get a little overlapped or whatever you can come in and tap it tight so now one chases the other and i like to put my my thumb over it as i bring it around and you're keeping your wires straight you know work with neat wire don't get it all bent up because it shows in your work afterwards so you can just tap that a little bit now i'm going to say with the 18 gauge wire four turns are probably the maximum you're going to get because this wire is stiffening up as i work this and as it does that it won't stay close together so to keep it from separating we're just going to do it that much so that's about four turns i'm going to give it a nice tap with my rawhide mallet the thing with the raw my rawhide mallet is that it's softer than the metal you're working with so it will move your wire without denting it or marking it okay so now i have my wires are parallel to the the mandrel and now i'm going to take this off and we're going to take these wires and we're going to wrap them around we're going to wrap them around the shank one time on each side so we're going to take our flat nose pliers and i'm just going to hold my hold my uh my little spiral steady here so that it doesn't get bent out of shape or or distorted as i work my wire now i'm going to take this wire here and i'm just going to bend it i'm going to bend it through and i like to take my wire up underneath my coil that makes the wire hug the that makes the wire hug the uh i'm gonna take my chain nose here makes the wire stay close to the uh coil here or the spiral all right and so now i like to do like this ratchet right i'm just pulling and pulling okay and that's separated a little bit so i'm just going to come in here i'm going to squeeze that a little bit together and if you have some little issues you can just put it back on your mandrel all right so what i do to one side i like to do to the other so i'm going to come over here and again i'm going to hold hold that still and i'm going to bring my wire through this actually is way too much wire to work with this is really too long of a piece of wire i cut too much this is about 18 inches and i think for this simple ring here you only need about 12 inches or 14 inches i'm going to end up wasting a lot of wire okay so we have one wire going this way one wire going this direction here all right so now we're going to make our little spirals on the sides i'm going to put this back up on here now see with those little wraps there that i just did that bumped this all the way up to a six right so now this is a whole size smaller than what i originally wanted and it's because of those reps but let me tell you something here it's only the wraps that are keeping it making it smaller when you put this on your skin is still going to fill in all of the gaps so even though it says a six it's really not a six so when we start sizing this down towards a seven you wanna keep trying it on each time you do uh you tap it you wanna keep trying it on and checking on the size so now we're gonna do our spirals and um we're going to cut these to about an inch long so it's just about an inch you can just eyeball that okay so we're going to cut the other side all right all right so now we're going to take our our round nose pliers and we want our spiral to come in this direction we want it to lay on our shank so i need to turn a basic loop so i'm going to put this on my thumb this way right on the side here and we flush cut that end and i'm going to take close to the tips here and i'm going to roll it down and i'm going to do the other side too because i always do what i do to one side i do to the other okay so it's going sideways like this okay so then when you do aspire i can take your flat nose and this is a little tricky here to try to maneuver this with all this with the ring so when you do a spiral you want a little piece of your little piece of your your loop showing out the side here and then we're just going to push this straight up and we're going to bring this back down clamp that into our around a flat nose blah blah blah and we're going to just move that up now when i can't do this anymore i'm going to have to just hand do it so now i'm going to flip this over okay i'm going to come in here now if you wanted this to be a smaller spiral then you just shorten your piece there so there's one and i actually could have done this a little bit neater but you get the idea or you can do it this way where you take it like this turn it in and i have purple nails for easter tomorrow's good friday so i thought i'd have easter colored nails so yes they're a little garish but they're fun okay so there's our ring all right so now let's see what size we end up with all right so see we're we're at the six we need to be down here at the seven and this is what i like to do with all of my rings this is gonna shape your shank perfectly round it's gonna really make it strong and bring these together and it's gonna make a really nice nice shank on your on your ring so i like to put the shank on the smooth side for me to hammer on all right so then we're going to take our raw height hammer and we're going to whip like you're whipping eggs we're going to go whip whip and whip and turn with your other hand and we're going to hit hit hit and turn back then we're going to take it and we're going to flip it over because this is tapered and we have a double shank so one side is going to get stretched the other side is just following it so we want to do what we do to one side we have to do the other and then we're going to whip with with whip and at this in this case here you're going to try it on all right so here we go and it's not a it's not a wussy whipping it's it's it's uh you get a good a good hammer on to it okay then i'm going to take it and i'm going to flip this over and give everything else a tap oops sometimes that makes it that's how you get it off if it gets stuck you just tap on it okay so there we go see how nice and round that is that really strengthened up that shank and sometimes it moves things so i'm going to come in here and adjust this and squeeze that down and squeeze that down and i'm going to try it on let's try it on this finger all right and that fits perfect see that now you can antique this with liver of sulfur if you're not sure how to use liver of sulfur uh watch my metal work technique video and i show you how to antique with liver of sulfur so isn't that a sweet little ring and that looks really sweet in sterling okay so now let me show you real quick how to do something a little funky like this all right it's super simple you're going to take your wire and for these you need a little you need a little bit more wire so i would i would go ahead and take your 18 inches of wire and so you have some to work with all right so same thing that first technique is the base for just about every ring so we're going to take it to the top of the mandrel we're going to center it cross them flip it over keep them on their same sides that they were on don't let them cross over each other and then this what we end up with straighten out your wires and scooch it on down it'll stretch out you just gotta kind of just work it i'm going to make this one a size i'll make it a seven whatever all right so i'm going to put it on the seven now what i would suggest you do is when you're making rings keep track of your say okay i cut 14 inches of wire and i did a for the size 7 and 18 gauge and just figure out how much you ended up cutting off because if i was making a sterling silver ring and i ended up wasting this much wire that wouldn't make me very happy so you might want to take notes and keep track of what you do for different sizes and different gauges 16 gauge wire makes an awesome ring also okay so same thing we're going to come in here and we're going to turn that wire all right so we're here just like what we were before all right so if that's a little bit raised get your rawhide and give a nice little whack now if you want a ring that stands up high make yours your your cinnamon roll your spiral smaller if you want it to lay more flat make it as wide as as you can and you can go a little wider on these you can do about five um five uh rows on the 18 because it's going to get covered up with wire right so so here i've made a little bit of a wider one all right i'm just going to tap that into place just like that all right so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to bring one wire up and the other one so i'm just going to use my fingers so now you can get a little a little adventurous with this so i'm going to come in and i'm going to just come down with the wire like that so see how that turned out now that looks great just like that but if you wanted to do something a little more decorative let's see if i take this off so i can take my wire and i can just do some swirls like that and maybe do a swirl on this side and you want to pay attention to your balance so you don't want to do a whole bunch of work on one side then all of a sudden all your work is over on one side of the ring the other side is very is is not balanced so you want to pay attention to that so if i come in here and i maybe do another swirl next to that one and pay attention to the wire that you have left over and we have to wrap it around the shank to secure everything so i'll come over here and do another swirl you can add beads onto this you can do just about anything you want now i'm going to take this i have enough wire here and i'm going to wrap it around the the base here you want each wire you want to wire on each side if you can help it going in opposite directions so i'm going to put this back on the mandrel and i'm just going to give this a little bit of a tap just to flatten it down a little bit you can adjust your loops however you would like okay this looks really great when it's antiqued i don't care much for copper when it's not antiqued so now we're going to come in and we're going to do our wraps you can do you can do the spirals on the sides if you do the spirals on the sides just make sure you don't drop them down too low so they're way down here because they will bother the you know your other fingers so now this is kind of long so i'm going to go in just to make it easier on myself and i'm going to cut it shorter and now i'm just going to take my chain nose and i'm going to bring it through and see i bring it i bring the wire underneath my my top here because that makes that wire really hug it if i were to just bring it around i might have to take and scrooch that wire back up closer and i don't like trouble shooting all right so then when i tighten this i just sort of do i pull and i rock back and forth okay that side's done all right and that side's done and that's what i'm going to do now i'm going to cut it right flush with the edge and you can file down the little edges if you find there's little rough edges okay so that's what i've got now i'm going to put it back on my ring mandrel and that booted that way up to a six again so i also like to take my rings and i like to try to push them down and rock them back and forth and shape them before i start hammering them because now see that put brought that down all the way to six and a half so i really don't have that much hammering to do so i'm gonna put my shank on the smooth side of the mandrel i'm going to give that just a little bit of a tap and now it's tap tap tap spin take it off flip it over tap and it's almost to the seven so i'm going to try it on see how nice that looks it's perfect look at that look how nice that looks you'll crank these out in front of the tv in minutes they're awesome they're great little gifts they're fun little things they last forever if you make them out of copper and silver and there's what they look like when they're antiqued and i hope you enjoyed this video and i hope you'll subscribe for more thank you so much and happy easter you