Recently, I was in the ceramics studio one morning rolling out a slab to make a few new plates. Our slab roller is permanently set to what I consider too thick (maybe a half inch?), so I always roll it out further by hand. I was rolling a plate out to about 1/4”, and what looked like a little piece of dried clay was disrupting the surface. I considered leaving it in as eventually the water in wet clay gets pulled into drier clay bits and it all melds together, but as I continued rolling it was continuing to be an issue so I decided to pick it out.

As I stuck my fingernail under and pulled, it turned out to be a way bigger mass than I’d thought… and it appeared to be metal. After rinsing, it revealed itself to be a gold ring! Well, a formerly gold-plated ring that’s been significantly banged about through at least one pug mill processing. I don’t know how long it’s been kicking around the ceramics studio - days, weeks, months, and years are all viable timelines! It’s a shared studio space and we recycle our clay, so I don’t know if we’ll ever find out more about the timeline and its owner but I’ll update if we do. My guess is a student forgot to remove their hand jewelry before throwing and didn’t notice as their ring got sucked into the clay body. The piece never came together, so they recycled it back into our studio clay ecosystem and eventually, I found it! I posted my find to Reddit, and a fellow ceramicist thinks it could be this ring.

I asked our ceramics instructor Paul and my retired colleague Susan what they’ve found in shared clay in studios, and their answers were needle tools (scary!), metal ribs, bolts, and sponges. So far I’m the only one who’s found a gold ring.

If you’re familiar with children’s and young-adult literature, you might agree that this could be a promising beginning that could lead to future magical shenanigans or inherited kingdoms!