My favourite style of jewellery to make. — David Taylor - Master Jeweller

30th June 2017

Regular readers of my website will know exactly the type of jewellery I am talking about. Today I will share with you a ring that I finished this week.

The desired ring and what we had to work with.

The materials that I had to work with were an engagement, wedding and eternity ring set (of sorts). The engagement and wedding ring were both 18ct white gold and the eternity ring 14ct white gold. We started by searching for photos of rings that my customer liked. This was the pick of the bunch.

This new ring was to be an all in one engagement and wedding ring made out of new gold, using her existing diamonds and adding in some new ones. The old rings were to be made into a plain wedding ring that she could wear at times not suitable for her good ring.

Creating the design in Photoshop

Using image editing software I took the dimensions of what we had to work with and modified the photo to reflect what was possible.

I did not worry too much about turning the cushion cut diamonds in the photo into the round diamonds my customer had, we were creating a general layout of the design to give an idea of how my customers existing 3 diamonds diameters and her finger size would translate to this design.

The rough mockup gave my customer an indication of what was possible. After editing the ring to scale into a photo of her hand she liked what she saw and asked me to quote on that ring.

Creating the design properly - the top view

Laying the design out precisely for manufacture is a time consuming process and not something that I can do for a quote. Often these take hours to complete and with the amount of quote requests I get weekly I would soon have no time to make jewellery....and no income.

This quote was approved, the customer paid a 30% deposit and I started to layout the design. The first aspect of the design that we address is the top view.

With the limitations of editing an existing photo now gone we could create the lines of the ring as we desired.

Ring Gallery

Our next task is to address the front of the ring. The addition of gallery features to rings is often something that I put a lot of time into despite it being a feature not so often visible and appreciated.

Back to the top - the ring shoulders

Either side of the setting some detail was planned to be added on the shoulders of the ring. Here we used a similar style to that on the shoulders of a remake I did dome time ago.

The draft

With the design approved it was time to make the draft. In the case of this ring the setting of all the gems into it was not a viable option but even unset it still gave my customer a great feel for the rings overall shape and feel on the hand.

During the making of the draft I discovered some small aspects of the design that needed to be changed. At the viewing of the draft I was also able to adjust it to her exact finger size eliminating any need to resize her brand new ring.

One more decision

It was my customers initial intention to have the ring created in all white gold. With rings the area that gets the most wear is the base as it touches objects the most.

With a white gold ring this means that the rhodium plating wears of the quickest there resulting in a need to re-plate the whole ring despite the top still being well covered by rhodium.

By making the base of the ring in yellow gold we could extend the amount of time before the ring needed re-plating by years. Being an active person she liked the idea and two tone golds it was to be.

The finished ring

The ring was made in 18ct palladium white and yellow gold alloys and weighs 8 grams. The centre diamond is a quarter of a carat with a .12 carat on either side. The total diamond weight of the ring is .80 carats.