Off the Stack: Ring a Day by Marthe Le Van

It starts like this. Grinding around in the car, the friend says he needs to stop at a bead store. Uuuuuuuungh. He promises that it won't take long, and refuses to let me wait in the hush of the running car. We go in, and I can barely keep my eyes open, until I spy something promising, "Wow!!"

Ring blanks. Simple, cheap ring blanks. The various adhesives available at home passed before my eyes, and I bought a bag. And two days later, another three. It's hard to be in possession of such blanks without filtering everything you see through the criterion of what should be commemorated, what deserves to be immortalized on one's hand. Less strident somehow than a Sharpie shirt, it seems like a natural progression.

I turned storage boxes inside out in my quest for the right tchotchkes. I searched until I was cross-eyed for my old Nixon campaign button. I found some silk flowered napkin rings that I couldn't believe I would ever have used. I ripped those apart, slapped some hot glue to them, and moved on. I went through my sewing notions and trim. At one point, I caught myself fixating on my hairbrush as prey, tempted to impale a hairball in tribute to Lily Tomlin's Rolling Stone photo in which she reportedly grabbed the contents of a nearby hairbrush and stuck it under her arm. Whether she was sending up Patti Smith, or Gilda Radner's spoof of Patti is hard to say. In any case, I backed away from the brush. One night while dawdling in front of the TV, I made palette of this summer's nail colors on the plastic insert from a Coca-Cola bottle cap. It looked so much like a dinner plate that I imagine a cup and saucer and bowl, all in white gold, set across one's hands like one would set a table.

There must have been someone outside my window, because arriving a week later, lying innocently in my mailbox, was Ring A Day: 700 Photos From a 365 Day Challenge by Marthe Le Van (Lark Crafts, $22.95, 256 pp.) Reminiscent of Thing-a-Day, in which one creates something every day in no more than one hour and thirty minutes, and no less than twenty minutes, Ring A Day explores the results of a year-long challenge to create a ring every day no matter where you are, using only the materials at hand. What began with a handful of jewelers posting to Flickr caught on with novices, metal craftsmen, and kids, with a resulting 16,000 photos, of which 700 are included here. And here are a few of my own efforts.

From left: silk flowers, black pom pom, a .357 bullet, and more old odds and ends

Lip gloss lids on the left, aforementioned palette, an old brooch