I've always loved fidgety things. I have lots of weird little bits and bobs from clicky pens to mysterious broken car parts. I wanted to design a fidget ring of some kind, as I have owned spinner rings but that thick stainless steel look just isn't really me. I had some ideas - I have some absolutely feral sketches in my notes from ideas from the middle of the night - but the flick ring didn't come about from nowhere. This all started as an accident in fact.
I was trained in classic silversmithing at a production job at Fresh Tangerine, a now-defunct jewelry company from Seattle that closed due to covid struggles. Along with simple soldering techniques, that was where I first learned to set stones. We used prefab settings and teeny tiny cabochons at that studio, and one of the most important things to watch out for, especially in solitaire designs, is stone wiggle. You simply cannot have a loose stone in your settings, it's poor workmanship and indicates a lack of attention to detail to your customer. After that business closed, I was gifted much of the silversmithing tools from Fresh Tangerine and that's really the only reason I was able to dive so fully into designing stuff myself.
So I started fabricating my own settings. I made a brass ring with a lovely blue lapis cabochon, where the setting wasn't that great because it wasn't annealed and therefore too hard to set the piece securely. Oh, the things I know now! Also this was just about exactly a year ago, crazy!
Yes, the only photo I have of this ring is on our dog's foot. You know what you're getting from me.
So the stone had that wiggle. I could spin it a little bit in place with my finger. I knew I would be keeping it since it was, as I had been told in my training, a bad setting. But I loved it. I wore it for days, wiggling that stone around and marinating on how I had kind of made a fidget ring, but I could take it further. There's not much that has stuck around my brain from art school, but one thing that was often asked of us students when we had made an accidentally wondrous discovery was "now how can you make that intentional?"
It was not much later that I got that light bulb moment. Deliberately making a loose setting for a bead, with a bud for stability, that could move freely would give a wide range of motion without free spinning! What!! I made my first flick ring in brass and pearl, and I still have that one to this day. I think I rode the high of my own genius (lol) for days. The months that followed saw experimentation in stones, metals, bud shapes, ring bands, and sizes. I am so pleased with the variety of flick rings I can share now, multiple styles and series. Because who doesn't have anxiety nowadays anyway?
As always I wish I could share more right away, but more are sure to come with time! I hope the offering I have now satisfies until I can build my studio. In the meantime, send me an email and tell me what colors and sizes you would love to see!
with love, Zoë