With This Ring

Well here’s something that you don’t do every day. The Boy and I made our wedding rings this afternoon. Thats right. Made. As in we didn’t walk into a jewellers and go ooohh, they’re nice, I’ll just whip out my fantastic plastic so if you could just charge them to my spendings account, that would be great. No. We just started out with two short rods of precious metal and ended up with three rings. Now I know convention would tell you that there should really only be two at the most (cause what – you’re actually planning on having a third person in the marriage somewhere?) but I am apparently one of those women who doesn’t do anything by halves. I want two rings for myself. Or maybe that should be I do actually do things by halves as each ring could be considered as one half of the whole. The two bands were designed to sit either side of my engagement ring and will both be given to me during the wedding ceremony. Whichever way you look at it however, they did end up being more work for The Boy. My job was much easier. His ring wasn’t half as fiddly and I only had to do everything once.

The whole exercise was actually a lot of fun. We turned up at the jeweller’s workshop just before lunch and confirmed the styles of rings that we were making that afternoon. Of course, there were inevitably things that we realised should have been contemplated previously. We therefore had a few moments where we stared at each other blankly going do you want a comfort fit? Do I want a comfort fit?? But we sorted that out soon enough. Our Artisenne then put us to work rolling out the gold to get it to the desired width, length and thickness etc. She had one of those spiffy digital vernier things to tell how far along we were to our goal as well. It could give you measurements to a couple of decimal places which I imagine would not necessarily be extremely useful in my day to day life but could be fun nonetheless. It was quite useful in making the rings however as the whole process was done by hand. There was no pouring of molten metals into a perfectly sized mould or anything like that. There was some naked flame involved in the soldering process but the rest of the afternoon was spent with various other machines and tools, not least of which were the hammers and the saws. And with that many implements of destruction, someone had to get hurt and it was me that ended up claiming the idiot prize.

To be perfectly honest, it really wasn’t much of an injury at all. It would be generous to say that I actually sliced my finger with the saw blade. It was more of a nick really. About 3mm in length worth of laceration but just like some paper cuts which are so totally not at all life threatening either, it stung like nobody’s business at the time and has been inconveniencing me ever since. And it was my own fault which sort of adds insult to injury really. We were warned about keeping our fingers out of the way when we were sawing through the metal to make the rings join in a circle. Since I’m not used to that sort of work though, I was obviously having a few issues holding the metal in such a way as to keep myself completely out of the way. Sadistically however, I was kind of glad to hear later that The Boy had a few difficulties when he was buffing my rings. With bucket loads of friction, small pieces of metal get very hot very fast and he was evidently feeling it. On the whole through, it wasn’t exactly a difficult process to make the rings and pretty much anyone can do it. We were guided through each individual step and our Artisenne even told us that she had previously instructed a blind man on how to make a ring for his partner. Due to his lack of sight, it wasn’t really safe for him to use the buffer apparently but he was able to accomplish everything else.

So we happily spent our afternoon muddling through each of the processes involved in making our bands. Lunch and refreshments were provided by the company, as was a digital camera on the day for us to document the entire project as we wished (although snap happy as I am I also brought my own “baby” as The Boy referred to it). Champagne upon the completion of the finished product was provided to celebrate as well and the wedding rings we finally ended up with looked really professional. Not that I had any doubts that they would look otherwise of course but its still pretty cool to see something that you would have been happy to pay good money for in a shop and know that you made it yourself. Or at least most of it. Because it does help that you get assistance along the way...

As much as we were able to, we completed each of the steps involved ourselves but when something was just that touch too fiddly or seemed to require a bit of a ‘knack’, our Artisenne stepped in to help us out and make sure we ended up with something that looked great. If we happened to have wanted any stones set in the rings then they would have actually taken care of that for us but we stayed “fairly” simple. They look after all the engraving if theres something you want carved into your band as well and we have actually been thinking about this option. We don’t want our names or the wedding date or anything like that though so we need to come up with another idea. The Boy did have the thought that we could use the words from the title of the sermon that will be given at our wedding, ie. Grace and Holiness which I think is kinda nice. It would be fitting and meaningful for The Boy to have Holiness in his ring and for me to have Grace in mine so we might do that. Its also probably a whole lot simpler to accomplish than using ‘With This Ring...’and’...I Thee Wed’ which was my other idea too.