The draft is important (part 2)

December 7th 2016

Sometimes just looking at photos you can miss aspects of a design. Today we will look at such a case with one of my customers and how my draft process picked this up and we were able to adjust the design to the desired shape.

My customer emailed me requesting a quote for one of my designs she had seen on my website. My design DR852 is a diamond set crossover wedding ring. This is how it looks from the top.

After the quote was approved the first thing that I did was show my customer how the ring would look on her hand so she could get a better idea if that design suited her. To do this I edited a digital recreation of the design into a photo of her hand to scale.

All good so far. In the case of this ring I had an existing silver draft of the design ready to show the customer so we arranged an appointment for her to come in and have a look at it.

When she saw the draft she noticed that the non diamond side was wider than the diamond side. She had missed this in the photos but once she had seen the draft she now clearly saw it in the photos from the website.

To see what the design would look like with both sides the same width I went back to the hand photo and edited it to reflect the changes. #1 is the original and #2 the design with both the diamond and plain gold sections the same width.

The changes were approved and I was now ready to make the ring. Regardless of whether I or you can see the different widths in the original photos this customer did not and the draft stage allowed us to spot this and make the ring exactly how she wanted it to be.

The ring was made in 18ct palladium white gold and has .48 carats of F colour and Vs clarity diamonds set into it. The ability to tweak designs to your tastes is one of the major benefits of dealing with the jeweller who actually makes your jewellery.