Skull Ring updates

A couple of quick Skull Ring notes.

First, Tony Creed has a new site that looks pretty slick. Go visit him at superskull.com!

I love Tony’s stuff; my first skull ring was my ELVIS LIVES ‘riffman’. Tony’s still the original badass in the industry and his stuff is stil as cave-man-biker as ever.

Second,another favorite designer, MT Maloney, has just released this brillian, HUGE ring: the JUPITER:


Jupiter

MT’s awesome, and this is really a statement piece. He won’t even be offering this in small sizes; you need Big Old Man Hands to wear it.

I want it.

Rabbit in the Moon

“The Rabbit in the Moon” – a pendant made by my father. I just found this one while cleaning up my office. I still need to polish it up, but here it is as I found it.

Dad made a lot of things like this; it’s one of the things I miss about him; his abstract logician’s mind turned concrete in silver.

He made these out of old silver coins (a 1940’s Australian florin in this case). He said he learned the skill in the army; he was in the south pacific in WWII, and spent long, tedious hours on troop ships. Jewelry was one of the ways he passed the time, sitting on deck to catch cooling breezes, working with small hand drills and files to shape bits of silver coin (in the days when coins were still made of silver).

The image is of the Rabbit, pushing a wheelbarrow down a hill; my father used to say the wheelbarrow contains “books with pale blue covers, about the goodness of life”.

Miss you, Dad.

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Skull gang

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The Motörhead rings in the front are my latest, from Great Frog.

Behind that are a several of my daily wear rings, from the MT Maloney, Deadringer, Tony Creed, Sinners inc, and Courts and Hackett – links are in the left side bar to all these.

shot with my iPhone 5, processed with ‘be funky pro’ app.

Skulls and one spade

The full collection, so far. Top row, left to right: MT Maloney, Sinners Inc (the one they named after me, the ‘Elvis’ skull), and $eri0s silver (a company that was ripping people off last I heard, so I don’t link to ’em anymore). Second row: Ruby Crush, Dave’s Customs, Ruby Crush, Deadringers Third row: Ruby […]

The Whole Collection

The full collection, so far.

Top row, left to right: MT Maloney, Sinners Inc (the one they named after me, the ‘Elvis’ skull), and $eri0s silver (a company that was ripping people off last I heard, so I don’t link to ’em anymore).

Second row: Ruby Crush, Dave’s Customs, Ruby Crush, Deadringers

Third row: Ruby Crush, Courts and Hackett, Sinners Inc

Bottom Row: Sinners Inc (the spade), MT Maloney, the one and only Tony Creed, Deadringers, Ruby Crush.

MT Maloney – elv13 and fortitudine

My friend MT Maloney just sent me a couple of samples of his work to check out, and I could not be much more delighted with them. I blogged a couple weeks ago about his work-in-progress blog, From the Workbench. But now that I have my hands on his work (and his work on my […]

My friend MT Maloney just sent me a couple of samples of his work to check out, and I could not be much more delighted with them.

I blogged a couple weeks ago about his work-in-progress blog, From the Workbench. But now that I have my hands on his work (and his work on my hands), I’m even more stoked.

MT didn’t just send me these, he customized them. We started talking about things I like, and what he got about me from reading this blog. He wanted to use something related to motorcycling, and something related to Clan MacRae, and then I thew back things I like (the number 13, etc). We threw ideas back and for for several days, and off he went.

What he wound up with was the MacRae clan motto – Fortitudine (latin for With Fortitude) on one ring, and on the other, his own version of ‘elvis 13′ (ELV13), which I think is bitchin’. The smaller one uses a triangular triumph logo, with ‘FTW’ inside – and make no mistake, that’s not ‘for the win’, as the gamer idiots think, it’s Fuck The World, as it’s meant in punk and biker circles for decades.

Below are photos of the two rings.

The larger is MT’s King Skull, his version of the big, chunky, realistic ring that is, generally, my favorite skull ring type. The smaller is his Little Voodoo. The little one is a pinky ring size, the larger fits my left middle finger.

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(click to embiggen)

Now, I think MT’s King Skull is awesome. In look and feel, it’s similar to the Courts and Hackett Keith Richards ring, but less brutal; bigger eyes, more detailed teeth. Less totenkopf and more poor yorrick.

It’s a great addition to the genre; it goes in the the line with the Deadringer Classic, the Courts and Hackett, and the Ruby Crush Belladonna. That’s some rarified company there.

But of the two, i have to admit, the one I really, really love is the Little Voodoo.

Maybe it’s just because I don’t own anything like it. It’s completely non-realistic; it’s a low-browed angry little motherfucker of a skull, like something out of a max fleischer cartoon. Like a pissed off dwarf.

But really, i think what I love about it is that it’s the first truly badass pinky ring I’ve ever seen. It’s thick, it’s heavy, it feels far more massive than it really is. YOu don’t think of a pinky ring as being hardass, but this one is. I think it’s a really great ring. It’s also really, really comfortable.

MT’s carving is also distinctive. He’s not trying to be elegant, which oddly seems to give his work a rough sory of elegance I didn’t expect. The lettering on the King Skull (the one that says Fortitudine) just makes me happy. If I ever get my MacRae Fortitudine tattoo, that’s almost exactly the lettering I’d want to use. The carving is personal (He really thought about this, none of it feels tossed off).

I had a conversation recently witha reader who wanted advice on a couple of rings, tryng to decide which to look at. If said reader asked me today, I would have suggested adding MT’s work into the short list being considered.

Good shit, MT. You rock.