Our Story
For years, we have made rings, supplied the tools and materials used to make them, taught the craft, and worked to improve the process itself.
For ourselves and other ring-makers all over the world.
Form & Forge is where all of that experience becomes something you can wear.
The story begins with one badly made ring in 2018.
Where It Started
I made a ring. Then I wanted to make a better one.
In 2018, I became a stay-at-home dad. I had always needed something to make, and rings gave me a way to work with my hands while raising my daughter.
My first ring was a bentwood ring.
It was not particularly good.
So I made another.
That became the pattern: make something, find what could be better, and try again. I did not begin with a business plan or any expectation that ring making would become my work.
I just kept making rings.
Learning the Craft
I did not figure it out alone.
Ring making was a smaller world then. There were fewer purpose-built tools, fewer materials made specifically for the craft, and far fewer answers waiting online.
Other makers answered my questions, shared what they had learned, and helped me avoid at least a few of the mistakes they had already made.
I experimented constantly. Some ideas worked. Plenty did not. Every ring taught me something the last one had not.
Over time, I stopped simply following instructions and began understanding the process well enough to change it.
That distinction mattered. Once you understand why a process works, you can improve it, explain it, and help someone else make it work too.
Bentwood Ring Supplies
Helping other people make rings eventually became the business.
The deeper I got into the craft, the more I noticed how much ring making depended on adapting tools and materials designed for something else.
So I began offering makers the things I wished had been available when I started.
That became Bentwood Ring Supplies.
What began with materials grew into ring blanks, adhesives, tools, equipment, original products, and an entire business built around helping other people make better rings.
Today, our work reaches nearly every part of the process: from the structure beneath a ring to the materials inside it, the tools that shape it, and the systems used to finish it.
Ring making is not a small corner of what we do. It is what our business was built around.
The Ring-Making Community
Eventually, I became the person people asked.
I began as the new maker asking other people for help.
Over time, those questions started coming to me.
Through Bentwood Ring Supplies, instructional videos, classes, and the Ring Crafter’s Facebook community, we have helped thousands of people learn the craft, solve problems, and make rings of their own.
That still matters to me. Ring making changed the direction of my life because other makers were willing to share what they knew.
Helping the next person make their first good ring is one way we get to return the favor.
Our Expertise
We know rings because we have built our lives around them.
We have worked with wood, metal, ceramic, carbon fiber, stone, opal, fossils, adhesives, abrasives, lasers, lathes, and nearly every stage between raw material and finished ring.
We have designed tools when the right ones did not exist. We have rebuilt processes because one step could be better. We have measured, adjusted, tested, ruined things, and started over.
Teaching other makers has deepened that knowledge. It is one thing to find a process that works at your own bench. It is another to understand it well enough to explain it, troubleshoot it, and help someone else succeed with it.
Expertise is not the ability to repeat the same process forever.
It is knowing what to change when the process does not work.
Form & Forge
After years of helping other people make rings, I wanted a place to create our own.
Bentwood Ring Supplies gives other makers what they need to create their work.
Form & Forge is where we create ours.
It brings together everything we have learned about materials, tools, technique, design, and the small decisions that separate a ring that merely looks finished from one that has been made to stand the test of time.
Some designs begin with a story. Some begin with an unusual material. Others begin with a question we cannot leave alone.
They all end here, in our workshop.
The Materials
Every material brings something different to a ring.
Wood brings grain, warmth, and natural variation. Opal catches light and shifts color as the ring moves. Stone carries patterns and textures that cannot be reproduced. Metal adds structure, contrast, and the marks of the process used to shape it.
Fossils bring something else entirely: a physical piece of a world that existed millions of years before ours.
Modern materials give us possibilities that did not exist a generation ago.
Ancient materials give us something no modern process could create.
We do not treat any of them as decoration added at the end. The material is part of what the ring is.
How Your Ring Is Made
Made here, with experience behind every detail.
Today, I still personally make the rings that leave our workshop.
As Form & Forge grows, I will not always be the only ring maker at the bench, and I do not want to build the company around pretending that I will.
What will not change is where the rings are made, how they are made, or the standard they are expected to meet.
Every Form & Forge ring will be made in our workshop by someone who understands the materials, the process, and can produce a finished piece that you can wear proudly.
Thomas
Form & Forge Designs — and Bentwood Ring Supplies