This is 6 Classic Wooden Ring Lamination Designs, your guide to using classic design elements in your wooden ring blanks to achieve an incredible look. You will love these laminations, so feel free to steal them for your own rings.
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Classic Wooden Ring Lamination Designs
Laminated wooden rings are extraordinarily popular, and thanks to the creativity of woodworkers and jewelry makers, there are many styles. Even though there are so many offerings, there are still several designs that are classics among ring makers.
These are the designs that never go out of style, and that always look good. They are a tremendous place to start for any beginning ring maker, and they can make you look more experienced than you are at the moment.
You’ll definitely want to start incorporating some of these designs into your woodworking and your ring making. The looks are timeless, and you’ll be able to make them come alive with the different wood species that you choose.
Here is the list, and I’ll go into each of these lamination styles in detail farther down in the post.
- Three Piece Ring Lamination
- Three Piece With Veneer
- Thin Faces Lamination
- Tall Lamination Ring
- Complex Lamination
- Asymmetrical Lamination (2/3 and 1/3 or angled)
- How to Make Them Come Alive
See Also: 25 Gorgeous Wood Species for Making Wooden Rings
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Three Piece Ring Lamination
This is the bread-and-butter of wooden ring making. This type of lamination is extremely popular, and it showcases the different wood species well. It’s simple, elegant, and a classic design in wooden ring making.
The beauty of this lamination is in the simplicity. It’s three segments, which are all equally sized in thickness. This makes up the entire body of the ring. Whether you use two species of wood, or three, it’s still a very good look.
On this particular style of ring, one of the things you can do to make it stand out is use contrasting colors of wood. Use something light in the middle, and something dark on the outside, or vice versa.
When you use contrast in this style of lamination, it highlights one section of the ring over the others. It doesn’t necessarily matter which color, as it’s possible to highlight both light and dark colors with this style.
To practice, lay three equally sized sheets of wood in a pile, and look at them from the edge. They should all be around an eighth of an inch thick for this style to work. Rearrange your pieces until you like the look, and then you can use them to make a blank.
See Also: Laminated Wood Ring
Three Piece With Veneer
Another classic lamination for wooden rings is an extension of the three piece lamination that was covered in the previous section. In this type of lamination, you’ll use an additional two pieces of wood veneer between those three pieces.
The benefit of having the wood veneer is you now have a border between the three pieces. This means you can use that border to get a different effect from the three main body pieces of the ring.
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For example, you can use the exact same wood species for all three of your main pieces, and then use a contrasting color of veneer for those two pieces. This can actually have an effect of highlighting all three main sections, even though they are the same color.
Wood veneer is awesome to use in your rings for a lot of different reasons. This specific style uses the veneer as a fine line of color to separate the other sections. However, you can use veneer as a highlight as well.
See Also: How to Use Wood Veneer in Your Ring Designs
Thin Faces Lamination
In the thin face is lamination, which could also be called the wide panel lamination, focuses on the center of the ring. This is the largest segment of wood, and it’s highlighted by two faces of the exact same color.
You can do this with veneer, but it’s actually a little bit better to do it with something with a little bit more thickness for the faces. Anything from a 16th of an inch up to an eighth of an inch is good. The goal is to highlight the middle section.
A good way to look at it is that the middle section should be at least twice the size of the two outer sections. This makes the faces look like a thin frame, and the centerpiece becomes the star of the ring.
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This is a really good lamination to use when you have an excellent looking piece of wood that’s closer to a quarter inch or more, and you want to highlight that on your ring. The small faces provide a little bit of a framing or a border of fact, and that further highlights the main piece.
See Also: Essential Wooden Ring Making Tools List
Tall Lamination Ring
The tall lamination ring doesn’t suffer from having as many rules as the first few that I’ve mentioned, but you don’t want to make anything that looks unplanned. This style of lamination is just a taller example with more layers.
In order to avoid an unplanned look, it’s best to shoot for some symmetry. Make your center layer the mirror point, and everything above and below it matches. This is actually a pretty cool look, especially if you have many layers.
Use thinner layers in conjunction with some of your normal layers, that way you can provide that added complexity without getting too tall. Anything north of 3/4 of an inch to one full inch becomes difficult to wear, because it’s hard to bend your finger.
Experiment with different stacks of material in your shop before you commit to this kind of ring. It’s going to take a lot of different pieces of wood to create the lamination, so you can be out quite a bit of material cost if you don’t plan.
See Also: 10 Helpful Tips for Gluing Wooden Ring Blanks
Complex Lamination
This lamination, called the complex laminated ring is another free form type of ring where you can express a little bit of your woodworking talent. There really isn’t any right or wrong here, it’s just a matter of making it look intentional.
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In this type of lamination, make it a point to glue up several different pieces of wood, but don’t just stack them, focus on different angles and different gluing methods. You can do more than just stack things up, you can also cut flat sections and add more pieces.
You can even shave down something that you’ve already laminated, and glue more things to it in a second step. Your imagination is your only limitation, and that means you can do some pretty creative stuff if you just play around in the shop.
The big thing to pay attention to is making it look intentional. If your complex laminated ring looks like a mishmash of crap all stuck together, it’s not going to impress anyone. Make it look interesting, and make it look like you meant to do it.
See Also: Complex Laminated Ring
Asymmetrical Lamination
Finally, another thing that you can do with your classic laminations is to make something that is not symmetrical. In most wooden ring making, the designs are equally balanced, and the colors are made to be the same from side to side.
In an asymmetrical limitations, you’re intentionally doing the opposite. This can be amazing to look at, especially if you’re used to looking at things that are symmetrical. It can even be a little difficult to create this style of ring at first.
Don’t worry so much about the natural resistance that you’ll get to this style of construction. There are quite a few successful designers that use the lack of symmetry it to their advantage. You can do the same thing.
Consider making the sections for only one face as a different color. You could also make another ring where a piece of contrasting wood is plated and angled. All of these are asymmetrical designs, and they can show some range in your work.
See Also: Top 10 Wooden Ring Making Posts
How to Make Them Come Alive
I hope you’ve made it this far, because this is the biggest secret to making all of these classic wooden ring lamination styles come alive. The only way you can make these looks pop like they should is with good choices for your wood.
If you use boring and drab looking pieces of wood, you’ll have boring and drab looking rings no matter how fancy the lamination. You need to make it a point to pick types of wood that are eye-catching, and that are rich in color.
Don’t waste your time at a hardware store looking for pieces of wood like this. You need to go to a dedicated woodworking store or hardwood store. You also can go online and look at a store for wood turners.
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It’s there that you’re going to find the best examples of wood that the world has to offer. These are amazingly colorful and vibrant pieces that can take any one of these classic designs and make them explode with life.
See Also: 10 Best Places to Find Wood Ring Supplies Online
Your Action Assignment
Now that you know these six awesome wooden ring lamination designs, it’s time to take that information out into your shop and take action. Pick out a lamination that you like, and start experimenting with pieces of wood.
If you haven’t done any of these before, I recommend the first example, which is the three-piece lamination using three colors of wood that are all the same thickness. This is a timeless design, and it won’t serve you poorly.
After you get done with that design, choose another. Experiment with different pieces of wood without glue to get your designs figured out first. After that, glue them together and then create some beautiful wooden rings.
If you have any questions on these six classic lamination patterns, please post a question and I’ll be glad to answer them. Happy building.
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