Ring by Sam Patania
I made this ring for the 1999 Tucson Museum of Art show. I bought this fantastic ruby from Jeff Graham, www.faceters.com , who I had been doing lots of business with during this time. This was before was aware of the problems in Burma. Now I have a piece of Maw Sit Sit from Burma that I can’t bring myself to work with until the political situation in Burma changes for the better. Until then the stone sits on my bench.
I haven’t shown any rings on my blog since they are so hard to photograph. I shot this ring on a piece of glass so it had the nice shadow and a touch of reflection. I should try that again. I do my photography with an old 3.1 mega pixel camera on top of a Cloud Dome. It looks to me like this photo was taken before I got the digital camera.
This ruby was so beautiful I wanted to put it in platinum. It was a one carat stone. I love bezeling stones instead of prong mounts, it gives the piece a better feel. Bezels make the top of the ring smooth. I didn’t want to make just a band ring with a stone so I put 18K red gold dots inset into the band. To give the gold more contrast I file finished the band.
I enjoy using platinum in less usual ways. Platinum is a joy to work with, I love the way it forges. Platinum is very nice bezel material since it has no memory. I use 90/10 platinum iridium which fabricates nicely. When the price of platinum went to $2,000 I thought I would never be able to work with it again but it has since come down to about half that.
When I made this piece Pat Kula was working for me as my office manager and protagonist. She helped me name many of the pieces at that time. We came up with Burmese Leopard for the dots on the band and origin of the ruby. This piece sold soon after the TMA show closed.
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