wasting my raw materials just for fun

I don't know how other people relax, but I know what works for me. I like to do things that are unnecessary but yield a finished product anyhow, you know, goofing off by wasting my materials stash. One of my favorite time-wasting ventures is to get out some fine silver wire and fuse up a bunch of rings. 

Fine silver wire is the coolest thing! It's nice how it can be fused to itself and to sterling silver sheet metal. But I can really zone out by making a little stack of rings. 

I first take my wire and wrap a long length of it around the wooden handle of my brass hammer. I have a ring mandrel, but for whatever reason, I always reach for that hammer handle instead. I make a long tight coil around the wood, slide it off and cut the rings like you would when you are making jumprings. I fuse them using my biggest butane torch, a totally zen experience since I usually do this at night and turn off my bench lights. I watch the metal glow to that salmon-peach color just before it fuses at the joint. I quench them, but only because the one time when I didn't, I burned a ring-shaped hole through the rubber matting I have laying on that part of my workbench. Once they are quenched, I use that same little brass hammer to texture the edges and then put them aside to be tumbled. 

I am always amazed at how bright and shiny the fine silver gets once it is out of the tumbler. It makes all sterling silver, no matter how polished, look dull by comparison. I have now made several stacks of these rings and wear them on several fingers. I also use this technique to make hammered links that I use in different projects, usually as a connector for a pendant, only for those I like to reshape the ring into a somewhat triangular pebble shape, a more organic and less symmetrical look. If I reshape it after fusing but before hammering it is easier to get the new shape I am going for, while the metal is still soft and has not been work-hardened yet. 

I don't know if it's the glow of the metal in the dark that I find relaxing, or just the repetitive action of making something I already know how to make, something that's not even challenging in the slightest bit, something so familiar that were it not for the fire coming out of the torch, I could maybe do it with my eyes closed, but something about the melting silver is the little relaxation award I like to give myself at the end of a long day at my bench.