There didn’t seem to be anything much physically wrong with the slender ring in white gold Rania wanted repaired. Neither was it too small for her, nor in her mind ugly. The problem was with the marriage it had symbolically held together. This had broken. Since she candidly added on the form that it had broken already in 2013, I felt enough time had passed that I could allow myself a little bit of irony in addressing my task, and because my impression of Rania telling me her story, was definitely NOT that she was looking to fix the marriage either, I decided for a conversion of the objects function instead.

Now, gold in itself is very malleable, and easy enough to simply cold-hammer into the shape you want. White gold on the other hand contains a lot of nickel, and this alloy makes things a whole lot trickier. Even if the ring had started out dead-soft, which as an aside I highly doubt, it would harden with every blow of the hammer and every twist of the pliers. In this way, the metal would go from being soft and bendable to becoming more and more stiff and hard as I worked it. The act of flattening it in itself would hardly increase the risk of breaking it, but bending it afterwards would. To avoid just snapping it off when I wanted to shape the bend in the end, I started out by bending it roughly in shape, and then as I proceeded to pound the metal, I carefully avoided hitting the central part which I wanted to preserve soft for the finishing touch of bending it into just the right curve. The point and barb I had to cut and file in the metal, but the final shaping went allright, as long as I stayed alert and kept listening to how and where the ring wanted to bend.

The chain was just a cheap addition from the thrift store, but necessary as one can’t go fishing with only a hook, one also needs a line… and bait of course, but that I cannot supply. That I leave to Rania.

Object no 14