Three are now one.
December 8th 2012
Continuing on with our series of remodelling jobs, today we look at taking three unwanted rings and making them into one new ring and the design changes that were made to use the existing diamond.
My customer had three rings she wanted to use to make into a ring design she had seen. She had enough gold in the old rings so all we had to worry about was the size and number of diamonds.
I did a quick mock up of the design using her diamonds and we soon discovered two things:
- we were short one round diamond
- her side princess diamonds were too big for the design and we had one too many.
Whilst the diamonds came together in the design the gold either side of the channel set diamonds would have to be so thin that the ring would not be as strong as needed to ensure many years of safe wearing.
Rather than buy in new smaller diamonds for the band we looked at some other design options and came up with the one pictured to the right. My customer liked the look of the graphic and with the quote accepted I created a silver draft for her to make the final decisions on the design.
Once the draft was ready we made the following changes to the design:
- the round diamond section would be in white gold not yellow
- the channel setting on the side would be angled and less rounded.
One more change had to be made to the design by me during the manufacturing stage.
Until a quote is approved I try to avoid dismantling rings. This sometimes leads to gemstones not being quite as they appear set in the ring. When all the small princess diamonds were unset from these rings it was clear that they were not a consistent size which makes channel setting a little harder. To hide the slight width variations I ended up making the centre white gold strip in the band slightly wider which enabled me to hide the discrepancies in size.
Rather than a straight forward process this remodelling job required us to change the original design to accomodate existing diamond sizes. It happens quite often in remodelling that the design process leads us far away from the start design to a truly unique piece of jewellery. The most important thing is that this customer loves her new ring.