Geralyn Sheridan’s Mitsuro Hikime Ring

By Tina Snyder

Enjoying an afternoon at Santa Cruz Wharf as a child, Geralyn Sheridan’s parents had a hard time tearing their daughter away from the saltwater taffy making display.

“I was completely mesmerized by the movement of the taffy-pulling machine,” she recalls. “To this day, I love watching taffy being made and the resulting striations and curves as the machine does its work.”

Ever since she started handcrafting jewelry in her Chico, California, studio, Sheridan has wanted to make jewelry that looks like taffy pulling in stop motion. A few years ago, she found her answer in the form of mitsuro hikime wax, a soft, honey-like wax that you work between your fingers much like pulling taffy.

“I had experimented with many different types of wax in the past, but none enabled me to get the sculptural curves I was seeking for my jewelry designs like mitsuro hikime wax,” she says. After learning that fellow jeweler Susan Zeiss made the wax and sold it through Tacoma Metal Arts, Sheridan ordered some and began experimenting.

The 14k gold mitsuro hikime ring featured here, which is cast in two parts and soldered at the top of the ring shank, is the result of much trial and error.

Forming the ribbon-shaped ring top before the wax became brittle took many tries. “As you warm the wax with your hands, you have a limited window to work it into the desired shape before it starts to harden,” she explains. “Once you have the shape formed, you need to set it on dowels to keep it from drooping while it cools and hardens.” (Comparatively, forming the shank was a piece of cake: It was carved in a standard hard carving wax.)

The brittle nature of the hardened wax combined with the complex curvature of the design also posed challenges for sprueing and casting. When Sheridan first started working with the wax for this design, she used just a few sprues made with hard red wax.

“I found the sprues would melt at the junction with the mitsuro wax and disconnect, resulting in no fills,” she says.

For this design, the answer lay in using a softer wax for spruing and increasing the number of sprues drastically.

“Due to the sculptural nature of the design, it required a lot of sprues to ensure every open curve filled,” she says. “So I used about 10 sprues along the bottom of the curving element that would be soldered to the ring shank to ensure every curve filled all the way to the top.”

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"I had experimented with many different types of wax in the past, but none enabled me to get the sculptural curves I was seeking for my jewelry designs like mitsuro hikime wax."

The resulting casting was a bit challenging to finish as well, as it required getting into the nooks and crannies of the curves. Sheridan used her beloved 3M radial bristle discs to achieve a brushed finish with high polished edges. She elected to keep the fingerprint texture from the wax forming process in the piece as opposed to polishing it off.

“I like that the maker’s prints are on the piece,” she says. “It shows that it’s handmade.”

For Sheridan, accomplishing her goal of handcrafting taffy-like shapes and striations in gold was a true victory—and certainly one of her sweetest.