I started out by looking at a bunch of rings. Miranda has a style that she liked and sent me a bunch of photos of (for me to purchase! hah!), sort of an antique look with lots of swirls. Unfortunately, there was no way that was going to be really successful with me making the ring, and I prefer clean lines with a more modern look anyway. I found this photo of a ring designed by a local Vancouverite, and took it to be my inspiration.
Then I did some drawings. I wanted to try to keep the “swoop” that I loved, but also to try to add a few swirls to try to blend the two styles a bit. I was ultimately unsuccessful, but in the page below, the bottom-left most drawing has lines across the band there were going to be like vines crossing the band.
I drew this on some note paper at work…you can see some work notes on the right. 😛
We visited a gem shop called Mountain Gems on Hastings in Burnaby to look at shiny stones. I knew I wanted a silver band with a primary colour red stone (because red is Miranda’s favourite colour, and because silver contrasts well with the red) (…and because Miranda had requested silver or white gold…). In this photo you can see we experimented with having multiple gems, an idea that I really liked. Not only did it bring our design further away from the source inspiration (because “inspiration” is good, but “copying” is not), but it also added some more flair to the ring. Again, in the end we had to leave it just with the one gem, for reasons we’ll get into later.
The gems in the above photo are a 5mm garnet with 3mm yellow and pink tourmalines. You can see that the prices here are…exceedingly reasonable. I had big concerns about this, as part of the reason why an engagement ring is more special than just any other ring is because you pay a lot for it. If I wasn’t paying $1,000+, it would be no good. My friend reasoned with me – how much do I get paid per hour? How much do I value my free time? We would be putting many hours into this project, more than enough hours to justify it. My sacrifice would be my time, and with this reasoning, I became happy with the cost.
After this preliminary design and thinking, we got right down to carving, which you’ll have to wait until next post to read about!
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