After finishing my first ring, I came up with all kinds of crazy designs. They all looked great on paper, but bringing the designs to reality was a different story. I lacked any real skill in working with metal and had no experience in what was feasible to create. I spent several months getting really frustrated, as pieces come out far from what I had planned, or not at all! In exasperation, I gave up the plans and madly started making things out of whatever was at hand, with no expectation as to the final product.  I emptied out my scrap metal can and started melting,soldering, sawing, hammering, bending, drilling and generally altering silver, copper, brass and aluminum any way I could. I was able to concentrate on learning and improving techniques, and to my happy surprise found the results were interesting and occasionally not totally ugly. Yikes, I think there’s a metaphor for life in there somewhere…:)