You know how I said I get requests for lot of really different things for wedding jewelry? Well here’s another one!

This particular piece is not different because the design is really crazy or anything, it is different because it is not what “traditional” brides want for a wedding band.

When this client came to me, she didn’t have a large budget, and she wanted a modern clean look for her wedding band. She also knew she wanted an aquamarine stone incorporated somehow.

As I usually do for clients that don’t have a lot of money but that I still want to help find the right jewelry for them, I broke out my catalogs of findings that I could buy and put together into the right piece for that person.

I found some wide silver bands that I thought were really neat and wanted to use those as a base and just add a stone on top. Whenever someone says they want something “streamline” I always think “bezel” because there are no prongs to catch on anything with a bezel setting. I found that I could get either a regular faceted Aquamarine or I could get a cabochon which means that the stone has a domed top. Cabochons are still made of natural stones, they just have a totally different look than the diamond cut stones most people are used to seeing.

I sent her a render with both faceted and cabochon stones so she could see the difference and also rendered the piece with the stone facing two different directions.

She decided on the cabochon stone (I was so excited since I don’t get to use cabs very often!) with the stone facing east-west. Here is the stone before being set in the piece:

All of the metal is sterling silver and the band has a brushed finish to give it a different look. I think the piece turned out amazing and I hope she loves it!

When I first decided to do my own designing it was very important to me to make my jewelry in the US to support the industry in this country but to do as much of it locally as I could.

I already have a great wax and casting guy in Arizona and I am not willing to sacrifice quality to use someone local, but I still needed a jeweler to finish all of my pieces.

I starting asking around where I was working at the time to get the names of some good jewelers in my area.  It was harder than I thought since mostly the name I got was the jeweler the company I worked for used, and that could have been a conflict of interest.  Luckily, one of my friends had worked for several other retail jewelers in Omaha and had a name of a different guy that she had used to do some ring sizings.

I went to see that last guy and their price list was fair and they said they could get the work done by the date I needed it so I left some castings and stones with them that I was putting together to hopefully sell pre-made.

Now if you look at my designs, you will notice that I love bezels.  Bezel setting is a type of setting where the metal goes all the way around a stone and is bent over the stone all the way around to secure it.  The castings I left had 3 bezels total and a lot of prong set stones.

I was very upset when I went back to pick up my pieces and the bezels were uneven thicknesses around the stones and the metal wasn’t smooth!  Also, my castings had been polished down to the point where one was so fragile I wasn’t comfortable selling it anyone or even wearing it myself!

It was a large disappointment to get back pieces that didn’t look good and really weren’t sale-able.  But at least I learned a lesson about giving someone work that you haven’t used before or even seen work from.

I have since gone to using the other name I kept getting and their work is flawless!