Harder than it looks — David Taylor - Master Jeweller

27th April 2023 - Customer Location: Weipa

Amethyst, Natural Emerald, Blue Tourmaline and Garnet birthstone ring.

Above is the finished ring, the customer loves it and has told me it is exactly what she wanted. The main feature of the ring are birthstones that represent the parents and two children.

We are going to look at what it took to get it made and why at one stage I had to inform the customers that I could not make it.

Determining the size of the gems to create the desired look

Scaled to the finger we now know the required gem size.

In the end it is not how a ring appears in a photo but how it look on the customers hand. To determine the desired look on the finger I did a digital mockup in photoshop for the customer to review. Once the gems size was determined we played around with their arrangement/order and the design a bit more.

Emerald being the most fragile of the gems and the outside position being the one that gets the most wear, I preferred to move it to one of the two centre positions which we eventually did.

Rounded bars added to the initial design concept.

Initially when the customer came to me a plain band running up to the 4 bezel settings was the intended design. We added in a rounded bar to the shoulders to soften the transition from the band to the gems.

An expensive way to get the right gem size.

I had the Garnet and Amethyst in stock in the correct size and colour. The Emerald and Blue Tourmaline I needed to source in. I managed to find a suitable natural Emerald quite quickly but my luck ended there. I spent 6 hours trying to source a Blue Tourmaline in the correct size and then gave up. I informed the customer I could not make the ring.

What a difference a week makes.

Not the right size but the right colour.

A week after this job got cancelled I received a delayed reply from a gem broker in Sydney. They did not have the size I required but they did have slightly larger. Buying an oversize gem and then adding the additional cost of recutting here in Australia is an expensive path to go down.

My only other option would have been to order in a gem from overseas but I would have no right of return if the colour turned out to be different from what it appeared in a photos on my screen. Screens can vary greatly in how they reproduce colour as do the cameras that take the photos.

I re-quoted the customer to cut the oversize gem and despite the additional costs they decided to proceed. We were back in the game :)

I got the gem in to make sure the colour was right and once approved sent it to Sydney to be recut.

Double check the finger size

A selection of sizers from previous jobs

This customer had provided a finger size for the ring to be made to. She had measured the finger using generic sizers and the problem here is that variations in a design width can vary the size required to fit the same finger. If the generic sizers were not the exact same width of the desired design then we might have issues.

Article: Different width = different finger size

The wider a ring gets the larger it has to be to fit the same finger and vice versa. I created some size drafts the same width as the intended design and posted them to the customer in Weipa. To no surprise the chosen finger size was different to the one she had measured using the generic sizers.

The range of gems inside in Australia for me to source suitable sizes, colours, shapes and qualities is rapidly declining. This is a very bad trend for someone who specialises in creating things out of the ordinary and/or to the customers preferences.

Paying for a gem larger than required and then paying again to recut it to a smaller size is an expensive exercise that more and more I am going to have to explore.

The next post to the website is going to show you another ring where this process went very wrong for me. The customer got the result they desired but I it was a disaster for me from a profitability view point. Live and learn :)