This is 5 Helpful Ideas for New Wooden Ring Makers. I this post, you’ll learn five great ideas to help you make better wooden rings right from the beginning. Enjoy.
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(Updated 2023)
Helpful Ideas for New Ring Makers
As a beginning ring maker, there are a few ideas that you can learn right away that will help you make better rings from the start. These are not difficult to understand, but they are things that sometimes take a little longer for you to stumble upon naturally.
Unfortunately, experience usually takes time. It’s through putting in the reps, making lots of rings, and learning about ring making that you make a little breakthroughs here and there. One thing you can do to accelerate that is to learn about the breakthroughs of others.
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Most revelations for one woodworker will also be revelations for many others. The ideas coming up are breakthroughs that ring makers have at different points of their journey, but you can incorporate them right from the start.
See Also: 35 Important Tips on How to Make a Ring
Find the Best Inspiration
One of the best ideas I can share with you is to spend some time upfront finding the absolute best inspiration that you can possibly find. Thanks to the Internet, and social media, you don’t even have to stand up in order to find that inspiration.
The problem with you is that you are only one person. You only have one brain, one set of experiences, and one idea about design. That’s a huge limitation when it comes to making any type of creative project.
In order to fill your brain with as much raw detail about ring making, you need to immerse yourself in lots of different styles and designs of rings. This is where following people in your space on social media and reading their content online is super helpful.
See Also: 11 Great Ways to Find Woodworking Inspiration
Combine Ideas and Different Designs
The next step after you give yourself a lot of inspiration and raw materials is to start combining those things together. This idea is universal across many different creative platforms, and that’s the idea of combining ideas in order to create new ideas.
For example, early in my wooden ring making adventure I combined making a wooden ring with making a tobacco pipe. Technically, I combined finishing a wooden ring with the buffing process for finishing a tobacco pipe.
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It was from having made pipes before that I learned about buffing wood, and I took that particular piece of knowledge and combined it with my newfound ring making knowledge in order to have a beautiful, glossy look to my rings.
Again, this may seem like something very simple, but it was a lightning to the brain moment for me in my shop one day. Hopefully this particular example of an idea can serve a breakthrough for you as well.
See Also: 13 Woodworking Ideas to Help Any Beginner
Make Lots of Rings to Get a Experience
Another idea that helps quite a bit is to make lots of rings. It’s not that you just need to jam through a bunch of rings to get your numbers up, you need to spend the time in the shop to get your experience up.
Academic learning is awesome, but you need to team up academic learning and inspiration with hands-on experience. It’s through doing the work and putting in the time that the breakthroughs are made, and that’s another idea that universal across creative platforms.
Make lots of different rings, and try lots of different designs. As you do, you learn different techniques, and you’ll add more raw materials to your arsenal that can later be combined and made into new ideas.
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See Also: 6 Classic Wooden Ring Designs
Write Down Your Ideas
If you don’t do this already, it’s very important that you start writing down your ideas. Your brain is not a warehouse, it’s a factory. The entire purpose of your brain is to produce, create, and inspire.
Think about it. If your brain was really meant to catalog and store facts, you would probably be a whole lot better at doing that. Objectively, our brains are actually not very good at remembering things, especially when compared to a notebook, or a file on a computer.
For example, if I asked you to memorize 25 different words, and then had another person just write those 25 words down on a piece of paper, the piece of paper would beat you every single time.
Spend time writing down your ideas so that you don’t lose them. Write down one idea a day, and over several months you’ll have lots of great raw material that you can work with and combine into new ideas and breakthroughs.
See Also: A Woodworking Notebook
Try New Things With Your Rings
Finally, don’t be afraid to try new things when it comes to making wooden rings. There are so many different designs and styles available that you really should try a lot of different things in order to figure out what you like.
Don’t feel like by trying something you have to do it forever. You don’t. In fact, if you try a different style of ring and completely hate it, you don’t ever have to make it again. However, the odds of that happening are very low.
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What’s more likely to happen is that you stumble on something that you really do like. Then, you’ll end up incorporating that idea or design into your ring making going forward. If you didn’t try something new, you would’ve likely not discovered that same idea.
Just by trying some new things, you can significantly improve your process and the way that you make your own rings. Yes, there are going to be some duds, but the wins and breakthroughs are going to be well worth the few that stall out.
See Also: Complex Laminated Ring
Your Action Assignment
Now that you know these fives awesome ideas for helping you become a better ring maker, it’s time to get out into your shop and take action. Pick at least one of these ideas, and start incorporating it into your routine.
If you don’t write down your ideas, that’s why I recommend you start. You’re probably already making lots of rings, so writing down your ideas can be a significant boost to your overall creative capacity.
After a few weeks or a few months, read through those ideas from start to finish, and you will be amazed at how many of them you’ve totally forgotten. Again, as hard as it is to swallow, when it comes to memorizing stuff, a piece of paper is better at it than you are.
If you have any questions about these ring making ideas, contact me and I’ll be happy to answer them. Happy building.
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