The little things
4th May 2018
This remodel was started back in March for a customer in Tully and was just finished yesterday. Quite a few challenges along the way and this customer (a Seinfeld fan), now refers to me as the “Jewellery Nazi”.
The desired design
The starting point.
The customer had a marquise diamond solitaire that she wanted to remodel. This is the design that she had seen on the internet and liked. It is a computer generated render and the design has some issues.
The claws on the tips of this main diamond are just way to fine to survive normal wear and also risk damaging the diamond at it weakest point, the tip of the marquise.
I also inspected the customer`s existing jewellery and discovered this customer thought jewellery was capable of surviving a lot more than it can and also that diamonds are indestructible.
The marks from doing body weights on concrete were all too visible on the rings and her diamonds. She got the talk and from that moment she referred to me as “the jewellery Nazi “.
Laying out the top view
We had to design rings to go both sides of the main ring so for now we just concentrated on the top view. This is a layout of the design scaled to her finger and main diamond size. I would be supplying the additional diamonds. I have replaced the claws on the main diamond with much stronger v-claws that would also match the side diamonds.
The design scaled to her finger and diamond size.
The name ring
For one of the side rings the customer desired a wedding ring with the names of her husband and two children on it. After some discussion this is what she thought she had in mind with the three names spread evenly around the ring.
Her rough idea of an engraved ring.
We were both a bit underwhelmed by that design and I asked her to give me some time to come up with an option. It is the thought that goes into these details that makes or breaks a piece for me.
I designed for her an embossed version of the name ring with all three names at the top. For the sake of speeding up the design process I repeated one of the names twice. I used bars to divide the names similar to those used in the main ring to set the baguette diamonds .
My idea of an embossed ring.
I still felt the ring lacked something and also wanted it to spread further across the ring. I introduced diamonds to the bars and was informed by my customer that you can never have too many diamonds. She liked the changes below.
The addition of diamonds to the bars.
The ring for the other side
Next we moved onto the ring for the other side. This ring was to be an eternity style diamond ring. Once again we used the bars to link the three ring designs.
The diamond eternity concept
With all three designs roughly formed we could now view them together. After seeing them together I wanted to change the 3 baguettes diamonds to two longer ones. That area looked too flat and short to me.
The three rings together
I made changes to the baguettes and the ring looked much more balanced to both myself and the customer.
2 longer baguettes to replace the 3 in the original design.
My customer requests a change
She wanted bigger diamonds in the eternity ring. We increased their size from .03 carats each to .05 carats.
One more little thing
After some discussion with my customer she decided that she wanted both the eternity and name ring to have the same span around the finger. To accomplish this we had to modify the number of diamonds in the eternity ring to less and to shorten the bars in which the names were embossed.
Aligning the span of the two rings across the finger.
Did you ever notice this about your diamond?
Unsetting a customer`s existing jewellery, especially when they have purchased it elsewhere, is a very important step that they must be present for. There are many things that are not visible once set and also other things that are visible but the customer may have not noticed. I need to bring all of that to their attention before they leave anything with me.
Outside edge of the right side is an uneven arc.
In the case of this diamond the first thing we notice once unset was how much whiter and brighter the diamond was unset. The existing setting was doing it no justice. The next thing that I pointed out was that the diamond had an irregular shape for a marquise and was not symmetrical.
In the original ring the diamond set on an angle and this was not so much of an issue. However the new design was symmetrical and down the finger. I would need to hide that as much as I could during setting.
The draft rings
Time to make the draft rings in silver. The customer was able to try them on to make sure what we had seen in images so far lived up to her expectations. They are roughly finished but they serve the job well.
The all important design drafts
When you put three rings on the same finger they may all need to be larger than if they were to be worn individually.
After some discussion about the wear that can be caused by rings rubbing against each other it was decided to create these rings right from the start so that they would be pinned together forming one ring. She already wore some quite wide rings so this was not an issue.
Size draft equal to the width of the three pinned rings.
We needed a ring draft that reflected the combined width of the three rings to confirm the finger size. Resizing these three rings once they were pinned together would be a nightmare we had to avoid.
After trying on the wide draft we confirmed that it needed to be half a size bigger than planned for the individual rings.
Are we there yet!
All done and she loves them. With all that planning the ring turned out and fitted perfectly :) A big thank you to this customer for allowing me to share the process of creating her rings with you.
