Creating love stories from metal. And melting them down when they end.
An interview with a jewelry maker who helps couples when they’re marrying and when they’re divorcing
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Jim Dailing got into jewelry making when he was a student at the University of Wisconsin and he saw his friend Tim Davis in a workroom in the art building cutting an opal. Jim stopped to watch and saw the stone come to life. “I began to see what was giving life to this rock — the fire from the opal coming through as it began to cut into it, I was just captivated. And I watched him in my mind, it was close to an hour. I don't know how long it actually was, but he noticed how interested I was. And so he gave me a rough opal to cut, and that changed my life.”
Jim took a jewelry making class the next semester and was drawn to both the technical aspect of the art and the meaning and symbolism of the pieces he made. His senior year of college he got a job at a jewelry store owned by a friend in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. Jim didn’t take much to the glitzy stuff, the sparkle for sparkle’s sake. He loved pieces with more meaning.
Most of the adults he knew growing up just got through their jobs to get to the weekend. Their jobs meant little more to them than getting their paycheck so they could do other things. And that made a big impact on Jim, who wanted to do something in his life that he loved and that had more importance. So while a lot of his early work was cocktail rings and things like that, over time, he began to be invited to create engagement and wedding rings.
And eventually, after his own marriage and divorce, he began melting down wedding rings and helping people redesign them into something new.
I spoke with Jim last year about his work designing engagement and wedding rings, and then, when necessary, melting down and transforming that symbol. Jim lives in Oregon, and you can find out more about his business at JimDailing.com.
LL: How did you begin your business making story rings?
Jim Dailing: When people would find me through my website … I was just so fascinated with who they are that I would ask a lot of very personal questions to get to know more about the essence of who they are, how the couple met, what they love to do together, those types of things. And without even planning on this, what slowly began to happen is what I've now learned to call my story range.
And so, I have become somewhat known for these story rings. And one of the very first ones I made was for a couple in Portland, Oregon, Brent and Yana, and they met and fell in love through a hiking group. And so as I got to know them, what evolved out of that was one of my very first carved mountain rings, and then in the sky, just one small single diamond, which represented the North Star so they'd never get lost in their journey together.
Just something so simple like that can become so powerful and the right equation or story.
One of my favorite story rings, I call it my eagle feather ring, but it was a lesbian couple in Portland. As I got to know them, I discovered that they're avid bird watchers who travel around the Northwest taking photographs of birds. And so the next meeting, I asked if they could bring a few of their images, and one was this eagle from the shoulder up, which is where the concept of the rings evolved from. And again, it's the notion or the essence of the design, they didn't come with that.
One of my more recent rings, and graphically really simple, but it was an older couple, avid hikers. And so they told me about their favorite area to hike. And so basically the bands were very simple and a hiker red gold that I alloyed. And then I did this, in essence, a topographic map of that region, that area that they love to hike so much. Another one was simply almost like a topographic map, but it was the John Muir Trail, and the gentleman in this situation knew where he wanted to propose. And so I set, just a tiny little diamond as a signifier for the place along the hike where he knew he was going to propose.
LL: You're telling the story of love through metal and gemstones, and I think that that's such a beautiful thing to be able to do for people and to give them and for them to give each other.
Jim Dailing: One thing that has always surprised me, even now working physically together so to speak, is that many of my colleagues, many of my clients, we've gotten to be friends over the years. I call many of the relationships micro-relationships. After all, they're typically very short and very intimate, getting to know who they are as individuals and couples. But it's not been uncommon that, say for example, people, I did wedding rings for 20 years ago, get in touch and send me photographs of their kids. It's like, wow, that was kind of a part of that. That doesn't get old either.
LL: Talk to me about getting into helping people redo when the love breaks apart as is a natural process — everything ends in nature. So how did you get into that? And talk to me about that process too.
Jim Dailing: My first divorce was in 1999, which is why I moved to Portland, and I had my old wedding ring and doing what I do and being who I am, I'm not going to give it to somebody else. I mean, that would just be totally bizarre, and I'm not going to take it and sell it to a jewelry store or something because I handmade it. But about a year or so had passed and I was working in my studio and it was on the back of the bench, and I had an “aha” moment and thought, I'm going to melt that sucker down.
And as I did it, the anger, the disappointment all dissipated. And something pretty amazing happened to me then — I began to see that the fairly powerful, not huge, but fairly large torch as I melted that ring was also melting any of the baggage that I still was holding to, not physically, but mentally and emotionally. And I didn't make anything out of that ring for quite a while, but I melted it down. And so about a week or so later, I was having dinner with a friend of mine, and told him the story. And he said, Jim, that's great. You need to do that for other people. And so after putting some time into thinking about that, the name that I came up with is called the Great Ring Meltdown. I had a friend who is my graphic artist create and print up what I call a birth certificate. And what I would do is I would basically charge anybody that took the class $50, but if they would have me make something with materials at a later time, it would just be $50 off the price. So in essence, if they worked with me later, it was free, but I didn't want to get bogged down in social politics. And so I would always have just women or just men. And for what it's worth, only women ever took it.
But what I would do is remove any gemstones. Then, I would have that time set aside for each individual to tell their story, what they've been through, where they hope to go in the future, that kind of thing. Then I would teach them how to physically melt down their old wedding ring.
And then there is a technique called drop casting, where you pour molten metal in water, and then it ends up with these organic little seed-like shapes. And so I would take the metal out of the water, and then I'd put in a little Ziploc with the birth certificate, and I would weigh the amount of metal and put the date of the meltdown and things like that. Metaphorically, the small bits of metal that I called seeds were for planting that new chapter in their life at the beginning.
It really is just kind of this releasing of baggage, and there is this primal quality of this powerful flame, the torch as years ago, the notion of melting something that could cut flesh, melting it, and then bringing it back to a solid again, I mean, it is alchemy. It is a magical thing. Today we have answers for everything, so it's not that big of a deal, but for the individual holding the torch and physically melting down their old wedding ring, it's a very, very powerful experience.
LL: Jewelry is such a powerful symbol.
Jim Dailing: It can contain so many different values and so many different meanings. For example, inheriting a grandmother or a great-grandmother's piece of jewelry. Because of that tie to your own history, it has so much, oh boy, I'm not even sure how to describe it. Just the connection to those people. And there is a basic perception that jewelry is in essence a commodity. It is a goal, which literally is a commodity and such, but it has the potential to take on so many lives and so many values beyond, well beyond simply just the value of the materials. And that again, ties into the stories of those who've owned it, those who handed it down.
LL: What are some of your favorite experiences designing jewelry?
Jim Dailing: So one of my all-time favorites, and this pair of rings is on my website. It's the Water and Desert Rings.
It was for another lesbian couple, and both are second marriages, and as I got to know them, one of the women was born and raised on the Oregon coast, and the other was born and raised in the Southwest desert. And at the time, my mom was still living down in Sedona, Arizona, so I would get down and hike and got to know that area fairly well. I always loved the Red Rocks, and one of my favorite metals is rose gold. So, for the woman who was born and raised on the Oregon coast at the time, I made it in palladium, but it's a very white, beautiful white metal, and I call it my water ring, but it's just a beautiful, subtle, kind of watery pattern. Very, very textural as it goes entirely around the band. And then the other, I carved in essence kind of the cliffs of the Grand Canyon, though the ring is not defined as a Grand Canyon, it's just that textural quality of the walls. But that was in the rose gold playing off the red rocks of that region. And then they wore each other's rings. So the woman from the southwest wore the water ring, and the woman from Oregon wore the desert ring.
LL: That's really moving. I wasn't expecting how beautiful that would be. Do you think you've learned anything about relationships by forging the metaphors of other people's lives into metal?
Jim Dailing: The thing that I think I've learned is in a relationship to be a balance of totally selfish and totally selfless. Because my first marriage, in hindsight, I think I simply gave up too much of myself to make it work. So because of that, there wasn't a lot of me. I really struggled for a couple years after that divorce because it's like, who am I? And I found myself reaching out to old friends just to, not for them to tell me necessarily, but to remind myself of who I used to be, which was a pretty vibrant person. And so to be totally selfish but totally selfless is — when that person needs you, you are there, but you need to maintain and build and thrive as an individual.
Someone in their 80’s, who had been married a couple of times (and happily so), said to me once, “You have to remember that every relationship will come to an end.” An Episcopal priest in their sermon once said “The idea of ‘till death do us part’ can either mean physical death or the death of a marriage. It’s OK to move on if the marriage has died.”
This is so cool and such a brilliant idea. I learned, when my fiancé left me for a bridesmaid six weeks before our wedding, that the "value" of a wedding band is nil on resale. I *did* repurpose mine as is and "married" myself in a little commitment ceremony with family and friends on the day of the cancelled wedding (plane tickets had been bought and time off scheduled and so my then sister-in-law suggested a celebration of me and my community in place of the wedding that would never be and it was a great time!), but it would have been more fun to remake it entirely.