Some jobs happen really quickly and others not so fast. A heap of interruptions added to a really difficult remodel resulted in this taking much longer than it would have normally.

The Discussion

This ring was to be a remodel of some old pieces of jewellery. The plan was to create from that jewellery an old style dress ring.

Square peg into a round hole

To get some idea of the direction desired I ran some photos past the customer and this was the one that she liked the most.

Now the hard work would start. There were three main obstacles:

1. We had to adapt a design that used a round gem as the main stone to suit a square gem.

2. The accent diamonds in the desired design were predominantly round and we had quite a few larger square diamonds.
3. She desired rose gold in the ring and all the old scrap was either yellow or white gold.

The solution for issues 2 & 3 was for me to swap out any of the unwanted jewellery that I had sold her for what we needed to make the ring work. Any materials that she had purchased elsewhere we would have to use. We now had half a chance of getting this ring made. 

Design

Often as we do iterations of a design I omit details from images to speed up the process. As this customer has been with me for nearly a decade now she was used to the process. This is the layout of the design that she approved minus all the mill-grain edging

Draft

As you can imagine with a ring like this resizing would not be a straight forward task. We needed to get the size right. The draft gave her an idea of the shape of the ring on her actual hand and also allowed us to modify it to the exact correct size.

For a design such as this it is not viable for me to set all the gems into the draft.  Once again this customer having gone through the process with me before was a bonus. She was very comfortable that the end result would be exactly what she wanted.

Deliver

The ring I have been told is far more than she expected. She loves it as do I. My regular customers know that this style of jewellery is my favourite to make and when you add in my favourite precious metal, 18ct rose gold, I am pretty happy.

This old style of jewellery reminds of a time when jewellery had so much more attention put into its creation. The time before mass production.

Here are some details of the finished ring:

• Main diamond .70ct Princess cut F colour Vs2 clarity GIA certified
• Accent diamonds .46 carats total diamond weight
• 18ct rose and Palladium white gold - 8 grams in weight.