Finally: a new piece to show off! Carved tapered solitaire with scattered ginkgo leaves in 18K white gold. The stone is a 6mm family diamond sent to me by the client.

The ring is a slight departure from my usual fare in that it has a very clean, symmetrical outline, but with a very organic pattern of ginkgo leaves arranged across the top. I’m very happy with how it turned out.

I took a ton of photos of the ring; click through to see them all!

I have some new custom pieces I made, which I’m very excited to show everyone. I just have to wait for the recipients to get them so I can post pics.

In the meantime, here’s one that is not necessarily a new design, but used a very unique natural color peachy-pink rose-cut diamond. Quite loverly!

Man. Nothing beats the color of 18K yellow gold. I always thought I was more of a white gold person but lately I find myself loading up on the 18K yellow.

And actually, here is another version of this same ring I did using rose gold and a gorgeous 1 carat stone:

I wonder how this ring would look using a huge champagne-colored diamond…

Virgin with potatoes

I know this is a departure from the usual fare, but I wanted to post a quick plug for my mom’s new blog. She’s been volunteering in a tiny medical clinic across the border in Nogales, Mexico for the past several months. She was sending us the most interesting stories of her days there and now you can read them too: arroya.org.

I live 5 miles from the Mexican border in Arizona on a ranch in a remote part of the Sonoran desert. Migrants passing through our desert seeking economic relief and work—any work— die within a few short miles of my home. I have been an RN for 45 years, and am retired—I was so through with health care. And then I read of the numbers of deaths so close to home. So I’m back—doing the most profound nursing care I’ve ever done.

Hello everyone! Just a quick reminder that I’ll be working up until a couple of weeks before Christmas and I’ll be shipping orders until about mid-December. Please get your orders in by the first week of November if you would like them be be shipped and received by Christmas day.

Now, let’s return to fall and pumpkins and leaves turning colors. Sheesh.

14K white gold, 1/3 carat diamond set into a blooming rose. Pretty pretty!!

18K gold wedding bands carved with oak leaves and acorn clusters.

Katherine’s husband is a botanist and the two of them have a particular fondness for white oak trees. I designed this set of wedding bands with three leaf/acorn clusters wrapped around the band. Each time I carve a new ring, it is my new favorite, and these rings are no exception. I think they turned out beautifully.

And some wax images..

Pic by Michael Karrer from Flickr.

The initial theme was “moon,” and some other things, but the moon idea was the most intriguing. I figured that just carving a bunch of bumpy craters would be somehow anticlimactic and just random; what would be really cool is if I could map out a section of the lunar landscape and actually carve a scale model of that around the ring. Which ups The Geek by a neat factor of 10, easy. So that’s what I did.

I asked if there were any favorite sections of the moon, any pet craters so to speak (don’t you have a favorite crater?) and was pointed at Tycho, the magnificent and fairly “young” crater with all the blast lines radiating out from it. It’s pretty awesome really, plus it’s rife with fictitious references. I spent a lot of time browsing Flickr images taken by various astronomy enthusiasts. Of which there are many.

The problem with Tycho was that it is hard to get the full effect unless viewed from a great distance, where you can see the thousands of kilometers of blast lines. From here, basically:

Pic by Michael Karrer. Tycho is the lower one in the middle.

See what I mean? Supremely cool, but if I carved it at such a distance, it would be a teeny poke mark with some lines coming out. I didn’t have that much real estate; one ring was to be 6mm wide and the other only 4mm. So I looked around at a lot of craters until I found a linear cluster of pretty cool ones.

This is the Theophilus area, which sounded cool, was next to one of those crazy flat mares, and had a respectable string of notable and named craters. I really liked the primary Theophilus crater, which had a cool tripple-peaked mountain in the center. I did some sketches, mapped out the craters, and was pretty much ready to start carving, when I found THIS section:

That is generally what is called the South Central Highlands (you can see it on the very first image of the half moon too; it is along the center line, lower half). Smack front and center, and I even got to include Tycho near the end of my crater string.

I started, more or less, with the three large craters: Ptolomaeus, Alphonsus, and Arzachel, and ended with Tycho, an edge of Maginus, and Clavius (which doesn’t show up in the above image except as a black shadow). I like this string of craters because they are prominent, right in the middle of the map, and have some really interesting craters and formations.

Pic by Michael Karrer. Another pic here.

Arzachel is cool, with a nice prominent rim, a mountain, a few baby craters, AND a canyon (rille) in the bottom. It’s named after an Arabic astronomer named Abū Ishāq Ibrāhīm al-Zarqālī. Obviously.

Thebit pic by Michael Karrer.

I also like Thebit, the double crater just south of Arzachel. The little bud crater hanging off the edge is just called “Thebit A.” I renamed it “Son of Thebit.” It’s too bad I couldn’t include Rupes Recta, that straight line formation to the right of Thebit.

Deslandres pic by Torben Bjorn Hansen. Here’s another nice one with major annotation.

I was particularly fond of the whole Deslandres area. A large heart-shaped crater-remains with a lot of other little compound craters smacked all around it. The best part is right in the middle is a neat little prominent crater called Hell (!). It seemed perfect for a pair of wedding bands. The other cool thing about Deslandres is that the little smooth spot northwest of Hell, called the “bright spot,” is actually one of the brightest spots on the moon visible from the earth during a full moon. You can look up at night and actually see this. If you are looking carefully.

Incidentally, Hell Crater is not named for the famed underworld of pop mythology but rather after a Jesuit Priest named Maximilian Hell.

Moving along.. Tycho is of course totally rad, no doubt about that. Ultra prominent with its own little mountain in the middle (I wonder what the scale of these features actually is compared to mountains and canyons here on earth).

Lastly, we have Clavius, one of the very largest craters on the moon. It’s apparently visible to the naked eye but I haven’t managed to get out there on a good clear 1/2 moon night (pesky Portland weather) to check that. I will though. I feel like these craters are my own personal friends after carving them twice at a 1:2142857 scale.

Clavius pic by Michael Karrer.

See how cool? Clavius is also notable for being the location of a fictitious settlement, Clavius Base, in 2001, A Space Odyssey.

After all that, here are the rings. I did his in palladium 950 and hers in 14K rose gold with a little pink champagne-colored diamond set right smack in Hell. Her ring was essentially a tinier version of his ring and so with the width difference, I was able to simply scale down the ring entirely and not have to trim out much, if any, of the formations.

The ring starts out with the three biggies: Ptolomaeus, Alphonsus, and Arzachel.

Then Thebit/Son of Thebit and the upper edge of Purbach. You can see the start of the Deslandres area on his ring below.

Deslandres, Hell, Lexell. Her ring has a tiny pink/champagne colored diamond set in Hell.

Things get a little hectic after Deslandres. Most prominent is Tycho though, the, um, prominent crater there with the mountain in the middle.

Here’s Clavius. It’s a large flat-bottomed crater with many baby craters smacked all around the edges and inside. On his ring in particular, you can see the lower rim of Maginus to the left of Clavius, at the top edge of the ring. This is the ‘end’ of the design/landscape segment where it comes back around to Ptolomaeus.

Just for kicks, here’s a photo of the waxes. Deslandres area, before I tweaked her ring to accommodate the stone.

And lastly, I have to thank all of the astronomy buffs out there with the awesome flickr sets. I was able to look at a bunch different photos and angles of each major crater before carving each. I love the internet. I also posted a couple of these pictures without permission (I can’t figure out where I found them in the first place) so if anyone recognizes their image, let me know and I can credit you or remove it, whichever you wish.

Hand-carved Forest of Trees band with eight (I believe) recycled diamonds (picked out of old jewelry the client sent me). I am damned happy with how this ring turned out. It was a long time in the making, with no fewer than fifty thousand emails back and forth with the client beginning in October of last year I think it was, extensive research into how not to be charged customs for stones and metal that she was sending me to use in the ring, extraction of stones and recycling of old gold, and then I began carving! Whew!

The design started out as “trees” and finalized to be Ancient Oak Forest on a Bright Night with Rising Full Moon and Early Evening Stars peeking through the branches.

Here’s a shot of the early wax. I sort of ran with the initial ancient oak theme and got a little overzealous with the trippy branches. “Healthy happy oaks!!” called the client. I fledged out the trees with leaves and this toned down the creepy Halloween vibe that was threatening.

Moving around the ring. Main stone was about 4mm in diameter and the rest of the little guys were around 2mm. It is really hard to get good photos of bright shiny things that have a lot of texture and detail. I have to say though, no matter how nice something might look in the photos, it ALWAYS looks at least ten times better in person.

When I at last finished the ring and had it packaged and ready to ship, we were chagrined to find the Canadian post on strike; no mail was being delivered in the country unless by private courier. After a couple of weeks, things had been “settled” and the ring was shipped and delivered without incident (or customs charges! Hooray!).

The choice of 18K white gold was I think perfect. It is not as white as platinum, palladium, or even 14K white; I do not rhodium plate my white gold. It has a very slight yellowish cast, which makes it look like metallic ivory to me. Warms it up a little and gives it a more antique-y feel. It worked nicely to represent a silvery moonlit night.

14K gold Pond Lily ring set with customer’s salvaged 3.8mm diamonds! I had to do some reworking of the petals and bloom sizes to accommodate the diamonds and the finished piece looked pretty sweet.

Mmmmmm buttery.

Why hello there!

I like the entire ensemble here: Ralph Lauren dress, Tom Binns necklace and bracelet, but most of all, I like the ring. It’s by Yewn and has a jade center stone with a distinctive squared silhouette and a pave lattice motif. Like this:

I do like this ring. The necklace is pretty cool too.

This isn’t the exact one but it has a similar look. It is made from silver, and crystal stones possibly? The asymmetrical tangle look is nice and makes the dress a little more rock and roll.

Here she is on another occasion wearing a necklace by the same designer.

And I included a pic of Michelle Obama’s outfit at a state dinner at Buckingham palace. Tom Ford dress and supercool dangle drop earrings. I can’t find any information on the designer of these but I like the thorny-looking motif and the large briolette drop. Possibly diamond? I’d like that. Maybe not though; it could also be rock crystal or aquamarine..