The premise behind this storybook ring was four elements (earth, water, fire, air). Plus we hid tiny hearts in each scene. Because love! These are the two wedding bands together: Alan’s carved and cast into 14K white gold, and Kate’s 14K with a tiny emerald.

I initially did the ring shiny, which alarmed Alan a little bit as I’m guessing he was unused to wearing shiny things on his hand. So then we decided a matte finish would tone down the brightness and also maybe bring out the detail of the carving more.

It’s a hard call. I really like the matte, but I also like the shiny. I like it ALL.

More pics & description after the click!

First we have ‘earth’ represented by Camel’s Hump mountain in Vermont. In my sketches, I initially went all Denali on them, with a craggy alpine-style multi-ridged+valleyed mountain. Alan, however, decided maybe he’d stick a little closer to home. Living on the west coast surrounded by glaciated volcanoes, I find east coast mountains mightily quaint. (As long as I don’t have to ride my bike up one of them.)

The contrasting matte-finish version.

At the base of the mountain is a river that flows out into a bay and the ocean (water). (We’re not in Vermont anymore.)

Turbulence in the ocean turns into a spiral galaxy (fire). We’re definitely not in Vermont anymore. I looked up images of the Milky Way and carefully made sketches, then transposed them into the 3D carving with our solar system dutifully located (by a teeny heart!) on the Orion Arm. The milky way, I’m sure, looks very different from all those other galaxies, and my 8mm-tall carving is the spitting image..

From the swirls of the galaxy, we’re back to earth again with stormy clouds (air). I think the clouds looked especially nice in the matte finish.

Yay!