My brother, Rory, and his fiance, Charlie, visited in the summer of 2018. It came up in conversation how expensive weddings can be and the comment was made that, if they were to get married, they might well run off to Gretna to tie the knot with some “coin rings” as wedding bands. I’d never even heard of coin rings before then, but what a wonderful wedding gift it would be to my brother if I could turn my hand to it: the seed was planted.

After their departure some basic tools started to arrive, a jeweller’s mandrel and rawhide hammer to start with. The first ring I made was with an old British penny and it was a “tapped” ring much like the jewellery made by soldiers in the trenches during WW1 and WW2. It was awful, but it was a start.

For the next 6 months I practised making a different kind of coin ring, since the “tapped” type was a bit of a false start. This required drilling a hole in the middle and then "folding” the coin into the shape of a ring by hammering it down a mandrel with a mallet. Coin after coin, old British pennies and shillings were turned into rings with just these two tools. I learnt a lot and by this point I was quite proud with what I had achieved, though looking back the quality wasn’t great and I had a lot still to learn about coin choice.

It was time to look into new tools to make it easier to get a consistent shape and start making rings that were more “ring like”. It was early 2019 that I started to post pictures of my rings on social media, but I felt bad about filling up my friends’ news feeds with my amateurish jewellery skills, so “Gin Coin Rings” was born on Facebook.

My first actual sale was to a good friend, Ferg, with whom I went to university: he bought a silver Hyderabad rupee ring. There was so much affirmation in that first sale: someone actually wanted the jewellery I was making, so I decided to list a few things on Etsy to see if there was any further interest, it turns out there was.

The first year on Etsy was a real learning experience, having made over 100 sales and many more rings in practice it helped me hone my skills, my customer service and find my personal coin ring style. It has been incredibly humbling to hear my customers’ stories and make the perfect rings for weddings, engagements, anniversary surprises and graduations as well as being able to send my jewellery all around the world.

Since setting up formally as “Gin Coin Jewellery” in 2019 I have become obsessed with furthering my jewellery making skills, from using different materials to stone setting to making chains: I want to constantly push the envelope to create unique and bespoke pieces of jewellery that will be cherished for a lifetime.