"Handmade" has been worn down to nothing. It gets used for assembled kit parts, for factory chain with a charm clipped on, for anything that passed within a metre of a person. So it's fair to ask what it means here, given that my rings are cast — poured as liquid metal into a mould, which sounds like the opposite of handwork.

Here is the whole process, honestly, including the parts a machine touches.

The original is carved, not printed

Every piece begins as a block of wax and ends up a ring because material was cut away from it by hand. No file was drawn, no model was printed. That original is a one-off object that took hours and can't be recovered if it goes wrong.

This is the part that decides everything else. Casting reproduces whatever it is given. Give it a machine-perfect model and you get machine-perfect metal, endlessly. Give it a carved original and you get the carving — including the tool marks, the thumbprint, and the cut that went slightly wrong and was kept.

Casting is a translation, not a production line

I don't pour metal myself. The finished wax goes to a casting house, and I'll say that plainly rather than let anyone picture a crucible on my bench.

What happens there is old and fairly brutal. The wax gets a sprue attached, goes into a flask, and is buried in investment plaster. The flask is fired until the wax burns out completely and leaves a void in the exact shape of what was carved. Molten metal fills the void. The plaster is broken away and destroyed. There is no mould left afterwards.

That last part matters. A production mould exists to make the same thing forever. This is a one-way translation of one wax into one piece of metal, and both the wax and the plaster are gone at the end of it. Sending it out changes nothing about that — the casting house receives a carved original and returns it in gold. They can only give back what I hand them.

Casting can also fail, and does. Incomplete fills, porosity, a texture that comes out shallower than it went in. Then the carving is gone and there is nothing to do but start again in wax.

The hours after the pour

People assume the piece comes out of the flask finished. It comes out attached to a stub of metal, grey, with plaster in every recess.

What follows is the longest part of the work, and it happens back on my bench: cutting the sprue away, filing the join until it disappears into the surrounding texture, cleaning recesses without flattening them, deciding which surfaces come up bright and which stay dead so the form keeps its depth, setting stones. Every one of those decisions is made by eye on that specific piece. This is where two casts of the same form stop resembling each other.

Where I'd draw the line

I don't think casting disqualifies anything. I think two other things do.

The first is a model no one carved — a CAD file, printed in resin, cast a thousand times. The metal is real, the labour is real, but the form was never in anyone's hands and nothing about the finished object required a body.

The second is a piece where the hand is only in the last five minutes. Finished components bought in, assembled, described as made.

The test I'd apply is simple: could the object have come out any other way than it did? If the answer is no — if the process guarantees an identical result every time — then whatever it is, it isn't this.

What you're actually buying

A piece that was carved once, by hand, and translated into metal by a process that keeps the evidence of the carving.

If you order the same form twice, you'll get two pieces that are recognisably siblings and clearly not twins. One will have a facet the other doesn't. The patina will sit differently. That isn't a defect and it isn't a story invented afterwards — it's what happens when the original is cut by a person rather than calculated.

Handmade shouldn't mean untouched by any tool. It should mean the outcome wasn't decided in advance.