Wedding Rings & Keum-boo

In a nutshell, I made wedding rings for my two friends Jen & Noah. After being together for years they were finally getting married. Wahoo!




Now if you break open the nutshell, you will see that I only had two weeks to make these rings. As much as I would have liked to say "Yikes!", my thought process led to this statement, "Challenge accepted!" So it began...

I meant to take pictures of the entire process, but I had so much to do in a short amount of time so I opted out except for a quick shot with my phone camera.

I had to do a lot of soldering and I had some trouble with making the bezel cups for the gems because they were a small size 6 mm round. The part that I had the most fun with was rounding out the flat pieces of sterling silver to make the ring shape. It's when things really start coming together.



It was a very good experience to make rings in that short span of time, given that I had limited access to the metalsmithing lab throughout the week. Every new piece is another chance to learn something new and continue to refine techniques.

When the day comes for Cameron and I to finally tie the knot, I will definitely be making our wedding rings! I would love to work with gold someday, but it's so expensive that I am restricted to using tiny amounts to experiment with. I think that tiny amounts of gold look great with silver or copper, like veins. The Korean gilding technique to add gold to other metals, called Keum-boo, gives very amazing results. For example...

Little Mermaid necklace made by Lucy Palmer
Beautiful rings made by Robert Curnow

Comments

  1. Excellent work! I've heard rings are really hard to get right with metalsmithing because of the sizing and these look gorgeous. :)

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    1. Thank you, Stephanie! Sizing the rings was something I was worried about getting right, but it turned out fine in the end! :)

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  2. Dude, these are rad! What an awesome idea for wedding rings (:

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    1. Thank you, Eli! Something I forgot to mention was that they were having a steampunk style wedding, so they wanted rings to have a similar style.

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  3. These turned out beautiful!! It would be really special to make your own wedding rings.

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    1. Thank you! I think it would be really special as well. I am so glad to have learned these skills and that I can even make rings!

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  4. WOW! I can't wait to see what you come up with for your own wedding :D

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