Designing Our Own Wedding Bands Part 1

One of the single most annoying advertising campaigns I have ever been subjected to in my life has to be the horrifically stupid "He went to Jared's!" engagement ring commercials that have swamped television sets across America over the past few years.  The phrase itself is grating to the point of frustration.

As the months have passed and Katelyn and I find ourselves getting closer and closer to the big day, we've begun to think about exactly what we're going to do for our wedding bands.  The diamond engagement ring was "easy" enough, since I presented Katelyn with the Jabel heirloom ring passed down from my late paternal grandmother, but both Katelyn and myself knew that we wanted our wedding bands to be something personal from our own experience together.  After a quick perusal of the typical wedding stores at the mall--even going to Jared's in Portland, Maine for kicks--we decided that the wedding bands would have much more meaning to both of us if we had something designed ourselves.

After some online searching, Katelyn turned up a ring style known as "Mobius rings," which feature a twisted ring pattern.  She even went so far as to order a cheap sterling silver version of the ring to see how it would look when paired with her engagement ring:

Obviously, there are issues with the cheap ring; it's not wide enough, for one, to be able to easily display the Mobius twist in the ring.  Aside from that, however, the pairing of rings was something that appealled to us, especially since the final product would be in white gold to offset the engagement ring from a compositional standpoint.

Here's a better picture of a Mobius twist ring:

For Katelyn, the wedding band will be this style of white gold Mobius twist ring, potentially fused together with the engagement ring in order to increase the durability of both rings.

For myself, lacking any ring to start from, the project is a little more involved.  Thankfully, Katelyn's strong Photoshop background allows us to envision what the final product may end up resembling:

In order to go along with the general composition of Katelyn's ring set, I would have a white gold and a yellow gold ring fused together with one ring featuring the Mobius twist.

Of course, working with sterling silver mock rings and computer photo programs is quite different from actually putting rings together in reality.  With neither of us having a background in working with metal or making rings, we turned to a jeweler in Ellsworth, Maine--just about 20 minutes away from our Blue Hill apartment--to start bouncing ideas back and forth.  Peter and Leesa Farnsworth of Striking Gold Jewelers have been working closely with us over the last few weeks to help overcome any design issues with our wedding band plans, as well as to eventually make the jewelery when the time comes.

The biggest problem we're finding right now is having materials from which to make our rings.  With the cost of gold going up--even in this economic down time--we've tried to cobble together gold to trade in for materials, but we're still not quite at our materials goal yet.  Still, we feel as though putting this personal touch on our wedding jewelery will also help our wedding bands stand out from the store-bought options that you can find at Jared's and G.M. Pollack's and any other big-box jewelery store across the country.

While we'll probably refrain from posting any images of the wedding bands once we have the materials from which to make them--gotta save some surprises for the wedding itself!--check back here in the future as we continue making progress towards the creation of our own, personal wedding rings.