Hand-carved mistletoe wedding band with wide ocean wave and tree band. 18K white gold. Kirsten loved the mistletoe motif but my 11mm band was a little too much.. So I carved one 6mm—and I designed a mistletoe solitaire to match. She had a kick-ass old-style cut family diamond to set in the top.

I wish I got better photos of these rings. I reworked my photo-taking setup and the improvement is obvious. I had been diffusing the light at the light source rather than at the piece; it makes a massive difference. Photos from now on will be much much better. But anyway..

First sketches had a solid bezel with sprigs of mistletoe climbing up each side. However, we were concerned that the solid bezel might limit the bling factor from her old-style cut (modern brilliant cut diamonds return all light that goes in; older cuts sometimes did not..). So, I re-worked the design and opened up the bezel, letting light into the sides of the stone. The mistletoe leaves would hold the stone in place.

The wax shows that the solitaire does not actually sit flush with the band, as is usually the fashion, but is instead tapered gently up near the top. Not everything that is in fashion is the best and this is a way better design, trust me.

The stone is a lavender CZ I stuck in place to pretend. It’s only a tiny bit smaller than her diamond would be.

See? Graceful! (Not stumpy.)

The finished mistletoe band. It measures 6mm in width. It’s an odd thing to think about but as I carve more and more, I get better (it’s hard to call it “practice” since I’m doing it for real, so to speak). Not only am I more efficient and exact in my carving, but my designs are more sophisticated. My 11mm mistletoe ring is one of the rings I wear the most & I love it to death but I have to say, the design on this one is better.

The finished solitaire. Kirsten was too paranoid to send her stone all the way from the UK in case of possible loss by the post office so she had the stone set in the finished ring once she received it. I photoshopped a photo of an old-European cut diamond in where the stone should go just to get a nice photo of the final piece.

OCEAN RING:

Mark wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted but knew that he preferred a nice wide band. He is into surfing and outdoorsy stuff and liked the water motif on Jeff’s ring. I sketched the following:

All was a go and here’s the pics of the final ring. Each third of the ring has a different motif: gnarly old beach tree with water, water with breaking wave, just water. You can turn the ring around depending upon your mood.

The ring has a matte finish with a mirror polish on the rounded inside. I think it turned out beautifully.

After I finished the ring, it occurred to me that I had carved essentially the Lone Tree of Carmel. Nuts!

18K white gold solitaire with .60 ct diamond engagement ring with rosy diamond eternity band.

I’ve finally carved a solitaire ring to match my carved bands. It’s very sleek and simple with a tapered band at the top and thicker, wider band at the bottom. This helps keep the ring balanced on the finger (keeps the stone UP and not flopping around) and I think gives a really simple design a lot of grace. It doesn’t fit flush against the carved bands like you usually see engagement ’sets’ but I think that’s what makes it look unique and cool.

[The diamond is REALLY awesome. It's G color and SI1 clarity with ideal cut and polish/symmetry; the SI1 inclusion is singular and unobtrusive and 99.99% of the stone is perfectly clean. A really great diamond I think.]

I will probably carve a straight banded solitaire as well but I love the look of the tapered band the best.

Here’s the pair of rings I often wear together:

I began wearing it just because an 11mm wide band wasn’t really giving the impact I was looking for… And then I realized how cool the tapered band looked paired against the carved ring.

You have no idea how much I stressed over drilling out this big beautiful golden pearl.

Jacquelyn contacted me with this pearl conundrum: she had a pearl that came from a necklace (so it was drilled all the way through) but wanted it for a ring. So… could I maybe set a stone or do something not weird with the hole in the top? Being me, I’m all “We should put a diamond in that hole.” So I got to work. I made the wax, adjusted it to size, got it cast, finished it out, set the diamond in the tubing, shaped and prepped the tubing to be set in the pearl, prepped the mounting for the pearl… and then I stopped and sweat for like a week.

I was terribly paranoid about chipping the surface of the pearl when I drilled it out for the diamond stud. I drill pearls all the time and I use special pearl drilling bits, but they are only small holes, like 1/2 millimeter in diameter. This was to be a 2.5mm diameter hole and as far as I know, they don’t make special pearl drill bits this size. Regular twist drills don’t work; they trash the nacre and chip it all to hell. I have tried. One could suggest that I had two chances to set the pearl: once on one side and if that didn’t work, then I could set the failed end down and have a fresh chance. Naturally, that idea sucked because I just couldn’t give back a pearl all wanged up even if the wanged-up part was set down into the ring and invisible. Also, the pearl had a couple of little dits on one end; this end needed to be set down in the ring mounting. So basically I had one chance. GAH!

I decided to treat the pearl like it was a normal setting job and used the tools I use to set diamonds. Bud burr, setting burrs, etc. The trick seemed to be that I had to drill the pearl at an extreme angle to keep it from chipping (I know this because I trashed two other practice pearls figuring it all out). Then once the nacre is opened up, you can drill straight down. It took a steady hand and a lot of patience but when I finally got my nerves together to do the real thing, it worked flawlessly.

I was never so happy to put that ring in the box and tie a little ribbon around it and send it off. Would I do it again? ABSOLUTELY! My god just look at how awesome it is:

Like a jeweled gooseberry. With a big sparkley bead of dew on it. YUM.

Wide ginkgo band with multi-color blue sapphires. Lovely lovely lovely.

[This is what my hand looks like this morning; I feel very decadent when I do this.]

I have a couple of new pieces to show off today: the Poppy Eternity Ring and the Peacock Ring! I’m quite excited about the two pieces and have been wearing them (one, the other, and now this morning: both!) nonstop this past weekend.

First, we have the Poppy. I carved this actually a long time ago as a wedding set for some friends. I only now decided to re-work it to offer in the shop. I decided it might be cool with a few diamonds and so I re-did the poppy buds to hold little 2.5mm diamonds.

I’m really happy with how it turned out. It’s now listed in my Etsy shop.

The other ring I just finished is the Peacock Ring. I LOVE it.

This probably looks familiar.. I carved a similar more petite version for Caty’s wedding ring. Carving her ring inspired me to dig out my old peacock ring wax (started years ago but never got very far) and give it another go. The design was a little different though in that I had the peacock’s body on one side, the feather (pretty much like it is now) on the other. It is a lot wider than Caty’s ring but narrow at the base for comfort; I also left the bottom of the ring bare and uncarved. I picked and scratched at it a little and finally decided to cut out the bird altogether, which was just looking a little too scrappy and messing with my clean lines. I recarved it wider on top and made it domed slightly (it’s hollowed out lightly underneath). I’m pretty pleased with the result.

I agonized over whether to put the blue diamond in or a more traditional white one and in the end, I decided that the blue diamond is just so peacocky and cool and used it. It’s 2.5mm—fairly understated but still packs a lot of sparkle.

I don’t want to take it off.

[18K white gold and diamond ring.]

My grandmother “Mimi” died a number of years ago and though we never lived geographically close, we were close in the way that grandmothers and their granddaughters are. I idolized her and thought everything about her was mysterious and magical.

Mostly I have all those homey odd memories about her that I collected over my childhood. She had curly white hair and wore enormous bifocals. Her house always looked exactly the same, year after year. Her bathroom was all porcelain and tile and felt wonderful on your feet as you walked in off the carpeting. She was a master knitter and all her knit things (we always got something hand-knit for Christmas) smelled a certain way—Woolite, my mother told me it was, which she hand-washed all her knits in. Her cooking was heavy on the baked goods (as a grandmother’s should be); she made these wonderful cookies every Christmas (Mexican wedding cookies) that were always just OUT on a table for anyone to snack on throughout the holiday but they contained nuts and as desperate as I was to eat them all, I actually disliked walnuts so much that I only ever managed to get through one or two. She lived in Tucson, AZ, and drove a car that had over the years all but disintegrated from the UV exposure. She loved the song by Stevie Wonder that went, “I just called, to say, I love you. I just called, to say how much I care…” and when I was in sixth grade it played on the radio all the time. We’d turn it up in the car and she’d sing along in her warbly voice.

It’s funny how when you are a child, you have no concept of other people ever having been young. Or that they once had a different life other than the role you know them in, namely, “grandmother.” I always thought it odd that my mother was so testy around her.

I only know snippets of her life now. She was born in a town in the midwest and spoke only German; she didn’t learn English until she was sent to school. She worked as a nanny when she was very young. She married an abusive alcoholic (my grandfather, a man I never knew, but who was a very well-respected lawyer) who was much older than she was. She never had a job after marrying until after he died, when she suddenly had, like, four—and she did a lot of volunteer work. And her hair was actually not naturally curly; she had it permed.

After she died, my mother (the only daughter) was given her wedding ring. It was old and worn and bent so she sent it to me to make something with, using the diamond.

This was a photo of her from her first communion, I think it was. Anyway, I had never seen a photo of her in her youth. Old photos are always so interesting—the people with their rigid expressions and fantastic outfits. When they are of your own grandmother in her early teens, well, I was pretty fascinated.

The whole feeling of that old photo of her inspired my design for this ring, from the ruffles of her dress and the off-tint color, to the art deco era. My mother now wears Mimi’s ring.

Now I understand it was only a small piece of her that I knew. A fragment. I don’t find it sad or think it’s a bad thing though; her life was her own and I’m grateful to have participated in the parts that I did.

I got a recent commission for a matching pair of wedding bands with perhaps a fish theme (the owners had a sweet story about a minnow). I did a couple of sketches of minnows wrapped around a band. Then it came up that the peacock feather was the design theme of their wedding. Maybe we could work that into the ring…

A fish and a feather. Ooh!

[I may not know how to spell "lacy" but I do know my feather anatomy!]

I really had a fun time carving these rings. A while back I sketched a design for a big ol’ peacock ring (peacocktail ring?) but never got around to actually carving it. Maybe I’ll dig it back out now because I love how the feather motif worked on the ring.

I start out evenly: cut waxes, cut out basic shape with file, scratch in design with something scratchy… Then I go to town. I try to keep continuity by carving on both rings, not getting ahead too far on one or the other, but inevitably at some point I lose myself and focus on one ring until I’m essentially finished.

As usual, I carved the first ring (hers) and looked at my rough scratches on the second ring (his) and said to myself: “Oh bother; how can I make this one as good as the first?” This happens every time. And every time the same thing happens.

I carve the second ring… and I like it even better than the first.

Then I feel bad for the first ring.

But after a short time my feelings equalize and I really find in the end that I don’t know which one turned out “best.”

Because they both turned out perfectly.

18K gold custom rose and ginkgo ring. This is a recent custom order I finished for a woman in Japan.

First I sketched a potential design. Once this was okayed, I could start in with the wax carving.

To start with, I hacked off a slice of carving wax the width of the proposed ring. I bored out the inside to the proper ring size, filed the sides parallel, and filed down the top to an even thickness. This step used to take me a ridiculously long time but now I’m pretty good at it and can brute out a general ring shape in no time. I typically carve a thick ring; rings feel better to me when there is some substance to them. I start with 2.5mm thickness generally and whittle down from there. The final ring will usually be around 2.25 thickness.

I measured out my three rose groupings so they would be even and balanced. Then I started to sketch out my design by scratching it onto the wax with a dental tool. I often have to adjust my design once actually laid out onto the wax since it always fits differently than it does on a piece of notebook paper.

Here I’ve bored out the holes between the ginkgo leaves and cut away excess wax. I use a regular twist drill and exacto knife to do this.

Neatening the openwork and starting to shape a little. Once I get the shape right, I start carving contour with a dental tool. I have a number of dental tools but I really only use one, which I’m absurdly dependent upon. I got it from my dentist years ago and sharpened a new, pointier point onto it. I broke one end of it off a few years back and I’ll be severely irritated if I ever break off the remaining end, which has thee perfect angled tip and the perfect amount of springiness and flexibility.

Here I’ve roughed out the shape on the leaves and started to form the roses. I’m going for a lot of movement on this ring, high relief.

The wax carving is almost complete. I go over and over the piece to neaten up edges, clean up my scratch marks, and make sure the continuity is nice between the outside carving to the smooth inside edge of the band. I often use 1200-grit sandpaper in this step, which is pretty much crazy time, but I always thank myself later when I don’t have to sand irritating scratches out of metal.

Once I’m finished with the basic carving, I do the finishing texture and details. Here I’ve done a bit more work on the rose petals and added the ginkgo leaf texture. The wax model is complete.

The glamour shots. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine the ring when it is purple wax… I’ve been experimenting with removing the color, etc. I can’t decide if it really helps though.

I’m still working on getting the lighting just right in the new studio. I took the finished gold photo before I got my diffuser working right. Unfortunately, it’s the only one that really worked and I didn’t get any others of different angles of the ring, showing more of the roses. Oh well.

[18K white gold mistletoe ring.]

[18K gold art nouveau ring.]

I based the art nouveau ring design on a photograph of an embroidery by Swiss designer Hermann Obrist (1890s). The image was in an art nouveau book I saw once and I just fell in love with it.

[Hermann Obrist, "Whiplash" embroidery of cyclamen.]

I finally got molds made of these two rings. Even so, there is still a lot that needs to be done to prepare the waxes for casting (not even counting sizing…) in that they are just very complicated designs. Both are really awesome though; a couple of my favorites.

Both the Mistletoe ring and the Art Nouveau ring have been listed in my etsy shop.

This is the wedding set I carved for my (old—sniff!) studiomate Alisha. It’s the most low-key ring I think I’ve ever carved (fat diamond notwithstanding…). She had a very specific idea in mind and wanted it to be something that could definitely take a beating. In fact, by the time I got around to actually photographing the ring, she had been wearing it nonstop, the past weekend while demo-ing a pidgeon coop and garage interior at her new house. I think the dings and scratches rather become it really. I wasn’t comfortable setting diamonds yet when I made it and so she took it to a professional setter. It turned out pretty damned awesome!

Here I’ve paired her solitaire with one of my carved bands (the rosebud band). Sweetness!