It has been absolutely ages since I've done a proper post on Jewellery and I apologise for that, I've been that completely focused on games development that I simply haven't bothered putting anything up but thanks to that there's been quite a backlog in photographs to upload. Here are a bunch of photographs including photographs of an older piece that I finally bothered to finish that had a granulation technique done on it which just involves me melting silver into little grains and soldering them onto the ring itself to make patterns.
First up though, the wedding rings, as you'd expect, it's a pain in the arse because of the measurements, I got one silver prototype done in a day only for the people I'm doing this for to change their minds. I was commissioned to do two gold rings eventually after the people getting the rings decided on what colour they'd like and this is being done for a family member.
Big problem with what they've requested though, they wanted the gold in the style of the Lord of the rings rings, which is done with oval wire because they had finally decided on 18ct Gold it meant we actually had to change the wire ourselves to Oval by getting round first. In order to do this, my teacher had to help me by doing a ton of measuring and worked out we had to use a rolling mill to first flatten the wire and then we had to file the gold in order to make it oval and the right sort of thickness for the type of ring they wanted. We also had to repeat this process at the beginning using the silver wire prototype on top of everything else as we needed to make sure the damn thing would fit right before we started cutting up the gold to size.
Yes, that's right, I had to file gold, I felt dirty doing it and extremely conscious of the fact that thanks to how picky these people were being I was filing away money.
Here's a shot of the wire in it's normal form and below is the result we got with the gold.
By the way, this isn't even close to the end, it gets better, they want to have personal inscriptions on the rings. Since that is out of our hands we had to send it off to an assay office in Edinburgh not only to get laser engraved but also officially hallmarked, at least I will get a proper hallmark out of this because it's my family paying for everything. However thanks to that, this means even more time and money because we still haven't gotten it back yet and the date of the wedding is in September so yes not as much time to get everything finished as both of us would like.
It has been really enjoyable working in gold but it is making me think about how I would go about doing this sort of thing on my own I think I would have to be quite strict about revisions and so on to prevent annoyances. Perhaps maybe even charge money depending on how many times a client changes their mind as that would prevent them from fucking me around because with the first silver prototype that I managed to finish in just a day that was a day's worth of labour wasted and I'm not even charging them anything really to do this they're paying for the materials.
So onto the more fun stuff, I'm posting up some WIPs of the silver prototypes for you and also the granulation ring that I finished, hope you enjoyed the post.
This is the second silver prototype I'm having to make with the thicker wire I think.
Finally, the granulated ring.