Ring reborn
7th June 2019
My customer has just had her first child. To mark the occasion the couple decided to remodel her engagement ring.
Usually when I do a remodel we have to make some concessions based on the predefined dimensions of the existing materials to be used. What you already have cannot be changed and may effect how the design you desire looks.
The desired design
She had seen the above design on my website and wanted to make two changes to it:
remove the mill grain
lower the height of the halo
What we had to work with
This would be the first ring I have made for this customer. All the rings I would be remodelling she had purchased elsewhere.
When she got married she had a smaller sized diamond set wedding ring that sat next to her 6 claw solitaire. She preferred larger diamonds but was told finer would look nicer and she went with that advice. Later she added a matching ring to the other side. In effect two identical wedding rings.
Further on she decided she should not have taken that advice for fine diamond set rings and had two more made using larger diamonds.
The design scaled to her finger and diamond sizes.
The second set she would retain but the first two rings she wanted to melt down and reuse the diamonds to achieve this halo design. Above you can see the design modified to reflect her finger and diamond sizes.
Article: Those damn hand models
She has a small finger size so despite the diamonds being very similar in size to those in the original design the halo looks much bigger. As far as remodels go, this was looking quite straight forward.
Down, down, down
The design with the halo dropped down to the 6mm height.
Her existing engagement ring had her main diamond sitting about 6mm high from her finger. She wanted the same with this new ring.
The trouble now was that when you drop the halo down the supports became very close to the two rings that were to be worn either side and wear very quickly into each other. We turned them up the other way to give some more room.
Both the customer and myself felt the design looked a bit squashed after that change. You can see in the photos above we decided to change the supports design and also bring them down into the band to address that. She liked it and we were ready to go.
The draft
I next made up a silver draft and this allowed us to confirm how the ring looked on the hand and make any slight changes we might desire. It also allowed us to modify the draft to the exact finger size she desired and avoid any possibility of having to resize a brand new ring.
Draft design on the left and on the right shown with changes I would would make with the actual ring.
At the draft stage I felt we could open up the cathedral band a little more to improve the look of the ring. I also made some other slight changes that together lighten the side view of the ring up nicely. I was given the go ahead to make the changes with the actual ring.
The finished ring
