Creating Wooden Jewelry: 24 Skill-Building Projects and Techniques

King, a jeweler, debuts with an attractive guide to making stylish wooden jewelry. She traces wooden jewelry’s popularity back to the 1970s, when people questioned “the nature of... jewelry as a symbol of status and wealth.” To bring the field up-to-date with modern concerns about sustainability, she includes information on obtaining wood locally, suggesting cork as a resource to use, and wooden spoons as items that can be recycled. The projects, each explained via step-by-step photographs laid out in numbered grids, progress from basic to more difficult. Going in order, one can begin by learning to use a piercing saw and a handheld drill to make the “Walnut Squiggle Pendant,” and end by using an acid bath, ebonizing solution, and easy solder paste to make the “Oak Strata Necklace.” King occasionally suggests alternative materials, as in the “Twisted Willow and Cane Sets,” so those without the “patience to carefully coax willow into smaller circles” may instead opt “for a cane version of this design that is much easier to make.” Her well-appointed primer should find an audience both with woodworkers drawn to jewelry, and with jewelers seeking a new medium. (Dec.)