there were too many pictures to choose from for this blog post, so you get five for the price of one. however there are many more in the photoset on flickr.

last weekend ben and i made our own wedding rings. guided in a workshop led by the excellent Adam Clark of newyorkweddingring.com (there’s a san francisco workshop as well as one in new york), it took us each about 10 hours to make each other’s rings. we started with the gold from my grandfather’s wedding ring, which had been refined from 14k yellow gold into 18k white gold, a process that took about 3 weeks. we sent the ring across the country to a refiner on the east coast, where the gold was extracted, re-alloyed with palladium (what gives white gold its color), and sent back to us in a baggie of these little chips:

first we melted down the gold and poured it into an ingot (basically, a little turd of gold)* which we spent the rest of the day pounding, pressing, sanding and polishing into rings.

with the exception of the blow torches and a few powered polishing tools toward the end of the day, most of the equipment we used hasn’t changed in hundreds of years. hammers, piers, picks and files, and these amazing old machines that press the ingot into thin strips or bend it into shape:

the first half of the day is all blow torches and molten gold, the exciting stuff. the second half of the day is polishing, and polishing, and polishing some more. the scales estimated about 25% material loss from the start of the day until the rings were done, most of which was sanded off by hand on sand paper and files. i can say that this is very likely the only time i will literally be covered in gold dust.**

here are our rings, finished but for the engraving (fortunately a professional does that part). ben’s band is a white gold center band with narrow yellow gold bands on either side. mine is a white gold band of the same size as ben’s, but without the extra yellow gold. a small diamond sits low in a full bezel.

one of the amazing parts of the workshop is that we got to design our own rings, as well as make them. i wanted a single ring that would be both engagement ring and wedding band, so we were able to design something that felt a little like a hybrid of the two. from engagement to finished rings took about three months, which gives you an idea of the overall pace of wedding planning (we’ll be lucky if we pick a date before 2012 gets away from us!). it’s a little dismaying, how much there is to do to plan a wedding and how little we’ve accomplished so far, but at the same time, this is what we said we wanted on the first night of our engagement — that we wanted to savor this being engaged a bit, without letting the planning of our wedding and our life afterward overshadow this transition. these rings took us three months to design and make, but they are heirlooms that i hope we’ll have them for the rest of our lives. i’d like to imagine that someday after our deaths, perhaps our grandchild will melt these rings and use the gold to craft his or her own wedding ring. that maybe we’ll be able to pass on not only the gold, but also the love of making and crafting things, a sense of family and personal history, and a small piece of our love story.

-jcg-

* our jeweler said that the best way to hide gold is to melt it down into a little oxidized blob and leave it out in plain sight. i’ll keep that in mind for when i need to hide some gold.

** there were a lot of jokes about solid gold snot over the next day or two as the gold dust we’d breathed worked its way back out of our lungs and noses.