Field Notes
Notes from the bench and the hill.
Field Notes covers the working detail behind the jewellery: how a piece is designed, what changes between a digital model and a finished ring, and the landscape the current work starts from. It is a working notebook rather than a magazine, so entries are short and specific. More will be added as the work develops.
Design notes
Keeping a ridgeline readable at ring scale
A mountain profile has far more detail than a five-millimetre band can carry. Contours and photographs are simplified again and again until the line still reads as the right hills, not just a wavy edge.
The Yorkshire ring takes this furthest: rather than a raised, sculpted ridge, the profile is cut closer to the surface as a fine engraved line, a quieter reading of the same idea.
From the bench
What a rough casting looks like
Before any finishing work, a ring comes back from the casting partner still attached to its sprue, the surface textured from the investment mould it was cast in.
Everything visible at this stage gets cut away or worked back at the bench: the sprue is removed, the join is smoothed until it disappears, and only then does the ridge get brought up bright.
From the landscape
Why old places and landscape shape the work
The starting point for a piece is rarely the bench. It is a hill, a coast path or an old building with a profile worth carrying. The place is studied first, and the piece follows from it.
That is also why the Three Peaks rings carry real, specific mountains rather than a generic zigzag: the line has to mean something to the person wearing it, not just look like a mountain shape.
From the bench
Where CAD and hand-finishing meet
Every ring is modelled digitally before it is cast, the ridge cut into a comfortable band section and the slopes textured on screen so the light will break across them the way it does on real rock.
The casting itself is done by a specialist partner, not in the York workshop. What comes back is a rough casting, and everything after that happens by hand at the bench in York: the sprue is removed, the join is smoothed, the ridge is brought up and the slopes are polished.
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