A ring for Mom

December 31, 2014

A few months back, my mom gave me a chunk of gold she’d had melted down, plus some of her older jewelry. “I’m not wearing it anymore. Do something fabulous.”

Well. *grin*

One of her pieces had a bunch of tiny diamonds. I should have taken a “before” picture, but really I destroyed that sucker before it even occurred to me.

Working with gold and diamonds sounds super luxe, doesn’t it? And it is. But it’s also stressful — I was constantly aware of how precious my materials were, in a way I’m not when I’m working silver.

Gold is also a much harder metal to work. It’s not as soft as silver and it’s more temperamental when soldering. So I had this plan to make my mom a simple gold ring with her diamonds flush-set for Christmas, and it turned out that “simple” was the wrong word!

Guys, I made that ring four times. FOUR.

The first and second times, I got a little overzealous when cutting the stone seats. I cut one too big and the second in the wrong spot. //headdesk

The third time, I managed to roll the metal too thin, and the culet poked out of the bottom of the setting.

The fourth time I forced myself to go much, much slower than before. I recast the metal, rolled it nice and thick, and cut the seats smaller than they needed to be before slooooowly enlarging them to accept each stone. And even then, I very narrowly escaped having to do it a fifth time!

The end result, though, was worth it — mom’s face when she saw it was awesome, and she showed it off to everyone!