The beginning
When planning a wedding, it isn’t unusual for the groom to have very few demands or ideas about how he wants his wedding to go. Generally, James was no different. He did have one oddly specific request, however, he wanted me to make his wedding ring. When he mentioned this, I had never made jewelry before and had exactly zero experience in metalsmithing. Quite frankly, I thought he was crazy and very nearly shut down the idea entirely. It kept nagging at me though. I mean, how cool would it be to make a wedding ring? I looked at my local arts center and found a jewelry and metalsmithing for beginners course. I thought I’d give it a shot and if I was bad at it, it wouldn’t matter and we’d just buy one.
In the first class, I walked out having made a silver band and thinking that hey, maybe I could do this. I ended up taking around ten classes total and made a variety of rings, earrings, pins, and necklaces. At first, I was planning to make James a ring of silver, something I knew very well how to do, but then another idea was floated around. His family, as most families, had some old jewelry they never wore anymore. Perhaps I could make a ring out of that. Though nervous, I agreed and the gold was melted into a bar.
Because of many reasons (most of them Covid related) I couldn’t even begin James’s ring until I moved to the UK less than a month before our wedding. I set up a little workshop in his garage and got to work.
A few setbacks
For some reason, the gold bar was extremely stiff. So stiff that I could barely bend it even with pliers which is odd because gold is one of the softer metals. I tried annealing (softening) by heating the gold, but even doing that for ten minutes straight didn’t work. In fact, I heated the gold so much that part of it melted slightly and deformed the outer layer. This meant I did a lot of filing to get it back to a normal bar shape. Eventually, with a lot of bending and cursing, I managed to get the two ends together.
It was then time for soldering. Put simply, soldering is taking a small piece of specialized metal, heating, and joining the two ends together. With a bit of difficulty, I managed to get the two ends soldered together. The solder wasn’t the best and because of the stiff edges, the join wasn’t very neat. I ended up filing a lot of the metal around the join away to get it to appear more seamless. In doing this, the metal near the join was thinner than the rest of the ring and didn’t look very good. I figured that I could fix that (maybe).
However, the next thing I needed to do was get the ring over the mandrel to shape it into a round shape. Unfortunately, every time I would hit the ring with a hammer to try and shape it (something I had to do because the metal was so stiff) the solder would break because it was so thin.
Trying again
After some very frustrating hours, I felt like I was back to square one (okay, maybe square two, but still). Eventually, I decided that the best way to move forward would be to shape the ring as it would be in the end and do the solder very last. So then I hammered. And hammered. And hammered some more. The neighbors probably hated me over those couple of days. Luckily, James wanted his ring to have a hammered effect so I didn’t have to be too careful about denting it too much.
After a lot of work, the ring was in a round shape. I kept taking the ring to James to see how it was fitting. It is really handy having the person wearing the ring so close by to keep checking! Once I’d gotten it hammered and in position, the ring was a bit loose probably because I had stretched the metal out by hammering it into shape. I then sawed off some of the thinner bits and re-filed the ends.
It was time for solder attempt #2 (which was more like solder attempt #10). The first go melted the solder, but it didn’t go through the crack so it wasn’t viable. The second try worked. Then it was time to file even more. I filed the metal around the join so it was less visible, and even added more solder on top to help disguise it, and then filed down the edges so that they were even all the way around. After that, I filed out any unsightly dents or chips in the gold and curved the edges slightly so it would be more comfortable to wear. Finally, I sanded, buffed, and polished the ring to make it look like a true wedding band.
Final thoughts
This wedding band has been almost a year in the making. What I thought would be a fairly straightforward project turned out to be the most frustrating piece I’ve ever worked on, but definitely the most rewarding. During the middle of making the ring, I worried about whether it would even look like a ring at all, much less one that James would want to wear for the rest of his life. In the end, I am extremely proud of the way I (with some help from James and YouTube) problem solved our way into making a beautiful handmade ring that is one of a kind. It is special in many ways from being made of family gold to being completely hand crafted by me, his wife. From a crazy idea to reality, I’m glad we’ll have this ring to last a lifetime. I love you, James. Here’s to a long and happy marriage!
