Monday, November 14, 2011

DIY: Giving An Old Ring New Life.

Some of you may remember me making a post back in October about how my Grandmother let us go through some of her old jewellery that she was going to chuck out otherwise. In that post I mentioned coming across two rings. One was simply a plain looking silver band (probably a man's dress ring), however it was quite tarnished and black in some places. Hoping it was just dirt I used some jewellery cleaner on it in hopes it would come off, sadly it didn't so I'm just going to assume it's where the silver paint was scratched off.

Excuse the tired slack jaw look, all I have been doing is playing Skyrim - it became available on the 11/11/11 for us PC players and it's now 14/11/11 and I have already put in 30+ hours according to steam. I have no regrets.

Anyway, on tumblr I saw a post about giving new life to bobby pins by giving them a coat of nail polish (I have since lost that post and am unable to find it, if anyone knows where it is please link me!). I was curious to see if it would work with my ring so decided to give it a try. Since no one in my house is real big on nail polish I had limited choices (originally I just wanted to make it shiny silver). There were two steps involved:
  1. Paint ring in polish of selected colour / colours. It is quite likely you will need more then one coat and don't forget the inside! I left mine to dry on newspaper between coats, it seemed to dry quite fast. I think I put on about 3 coats because the red nail polish was quite weak in colour.
  2. Apply a clear coat of nail polish over the top, mine had little sparklies in it. This is just a precaution against chipping etc, which it will hopefully protect it from (to a degree anyway).
It was surprisingly hard to get a picture of it once it was all painted up, however, I'm very happy with the results. I think my favourite thing is that I could remove the nail polish and paint it a different colour if I wanted, so really, you could make it match any outfit you wanted.

This didn't cost me anything (ring was a gift as was the nail polish), and really, most people have unused rings / nail polish at home. You could also thrift some old rings and you can get nail polish really cheap at $2 stores etc (tbh, I don't think you need to waste expensive nail polish on this).

1 comment:

  1. Great idea! Would never have thought to do this, thanks for sharing :) xx

    http://modernlegacy.blogspot.com

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