Creation of jewelery in fine wood

Even if wood is used much less than other classic organic jewelery materials, such as pearls, mother-of-pearl and coral, it still remains a material of choice for making original jewellery.

Naturally, for the creation of jewels, precious wood is preferred, also using gold or silver.

The precious wood that we use most in our jewelry workshop is cocobolo wood, also called palo negro or rosewood in English, Dalbergia Retusa from its scientific name.

This particularly hard wood allows it to be worked like «a metal» and once polished gives a result that highlights the precious metals associated with it, as you can see with these examples of wooden jewelry made with this species of cocobolo.

Here we invite you to discover different types of precious wood jewelry and then follow the steps to make a wood and silver ring for men.

Examples of wooden jewelry

Rings in silver and precious woods

Silver rings, for men or women, lend themselves equally well to the inlay of precious woods as they do to receiving precious stones.

These two men’s rings in silver and precious, fossil wood are an example of this.

Wooden and silver pendants

The precious cocobolo wood lends itself, due to its hardness, to sculpture or assembly work, allowing the creation of complex pieces as demonstrated by this Egyptian pendant.

This particularly elaborate pendant combines precious wood, silver for the serpent, gold for the eye of Horus and precious stones.

You can discover the stages of its creation through this article.

This other pendant, much simpler in design, allows you to appreciate the wood-silver association and play on the depth of the wood cut.

Bracelets in fine wood

This precious wood can be carved, can be glued into jewelry designs, or carved to receive inlays into silver shapes.

These other more conventional bracelet designs feature precious wood inlays on silver mounts mounted on leather bracelets.

Wooden necklaces

Wood can be carved to create links which, once assembled with other silver or wooden links, form particularly original and spectacular link chains.

Wooden earrings

The motifs of these earrings are cut out with a bocfil then glued onto a wooden base which is in turn fixed on a silver support on which the silver nail is soldered which allows attachment to the ears.

Note that they are only 8 millimeters in diameter.

Steps to create a wooden ring

To give you a better overview of woodworking for jewelery creation, I invite you to discover in the photos the stages of processing a wooden ring with silver in our laboratory.

Another view of a silver men’s ring with fossil wood and precious wood inlaid

The processing of this type of ring begins with the welding of the laminated silver plates. 925 so as to form two rings, which will then be soldered onto the same silver plate.

These two rings make up the inner and outer parts of the ring.

Once we have concentrically soldered the two rings of different diameters onto the silver plate, we drill it with a small drill bit and then remove the excess parts with a hand saw called blocfil.

We then repeat this operation to weld the other side edge of the ring into place.

We repeat the operation of eliminating the excess silver plate and obtain a rough ring which must be roughed out and polished in order to soften the corners and bring out the brilliant shine of the silver.

Fine wood inlay on the silver ring

Once the ring is finalized, it can be worked to inlay the fine wood. Note that we would do the same for an inlay of bone, coral, or fine stone.

Let’s start by creating a cut on the outer surface of the ring using a small grinder. We trim the edges and then fit a piece of wood to the opening.

Note that the piece of wood must be worked into the mass to give it a shape that allows it to adapt perfectly to its placement on the ring. The wood is then fixed by gluing with resin then sanded to be flush with the metal of the ring and finally polished.

Final surrender

We can see that the wood grain stands out better on a light blue background:

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