I had decided to do something a little different and make some rings out of blue jeans and we used the special mold that we used a few weeks back, we cut up a pair of blue jeans into a bunch of different pieces so that it fit the mold accordingly and then infused the whole thing with resin.

So there  wasn’t a lot of technique to the first step, I got a piece of paper towel that I cut out to the shape of my mold and then I cut out the denim to be that shape that way it'll fit in the mold perfectly and as far as quantity goes I ended up just cutting out enough rectangles so that it stood about an inch high when it was just laying flat on the table and then once I put it in my compression mold, I was able to squeeze it down to just under a half an inch thick. 

So if you're trying this at home just know that your material, if it's a fabric, will probably start to shrink once you compress it to be about half the thickness of what it will be if it's just naturally sitting on a table stacked.

The process of casting the jeans into a piece of workable material with resin is a little bit different from what I typically do on materials. I mixed together two halves of resin-like I normally do but I got a custom mold that I made, and it’s a compression mold. 

I perforated the top of the lid for it and so what that allowed me to do was to pour in the resin layer by layer and then add the denim pieces until it got completely soaked with the resin and then I used the clamps to force the custom top-down and that will allow that resin to squeeze through it and it will get rid of any of that excess resin so our end result was a block that's mostly denim but it had just enough resin to make sure the whole thing held together

Then to cut out our ring blank I just used diamond coated hole saws and this was a little bit tricky I had to use a lot of water in order to stop this from overheating and obviously I didn’t want it to overheat because our resin can burn and then cause the ring to fall apart but eventually I was able to get the blank cut out and then I was ready to switch over to the lathe. I needed to make sure it was all cleaned up to prepare for the sizing sanding and the other finishing steps.  

The machining of the ring was fairly straightforward obviously it was made out of denim so it's not the most robust of materials and so I was fairly careful to not go too hard with any of my tools, I used the ultra-thin CA adhesive throughout the process that was able to soak into the denim fibers a little bit better than the resin was able to and that not only made the ring stronger it also really helped bring out the color.

Once I got the ring to size I went ahead and rounded the inside edges that way it was really comfortable to wear and then I sanded it all the way up to about an 800 grit. I didn't have to go super-high on this material because it was a lot more forgiving than some of the others are in terms of showing scratches. So once I got up to that grit that's when I put on the CA coating and then I quickly repeated those same steps to the outside just sanded it up to a nice high grit and then put on that CA finish and then the ring is totally done!

So that's the ring guys I think this one had a really interesting look to it the cross-section of the fabric pattern that the denim has to makes it is really interesting and I really like that it's not just a boring blue looking ring that we made the same color as blue jeans it literally is blue jeans it looks like blue jeans it's got the same woven pattern to it all of that it's a really fun material to look at and I think it especially works well for a ring in this instance and just all the micro-detail that it has so the closer you look the more interesting it gets that's always just a winning combination in my opinion for a ring. I love rings that are fairly subtle but when you give them a closer look they've got a lot of details a lot of work and time put into them that makes them something that's just a lot more special than for example a blue plastic ring. It's always fun to post the results of the ring that I've been working on throughout the week and I love hearing back from you guys to see what you guys like and I love hearing your suggestions!