Modern Stacking Rings With A Family Connection

I think you can tell these rings are really special even before you hear the story.

My customer wanted me to remodel some jewellery she had inherited. She showed me a selection of pieces she had and I recommended using two diamond rings, one which belonged to her mother and another which belonged to her grandmother.

We discussed some ideas and it became clear quite quickly that I should make a new version of my Cairn jewellery collection using her diamonds. The Cairn collection is a suite of jewellery that represents a journey and has gemstones and blocks of gold and platinum that stack together. 

I wanted to make something new and different to anything I had made in this collection before. I suggested having irregular shaped blocks of gold and platinum with the larger diamonds set in them and the smaller diamonds set into the bands. A total of four stacking rings would make up this design.

My customer liked this idea immediately and said the design was ideal as she has four nieces and she can wear the rings together now and when the time is right, pass them on to her nieces, giving them a piece of family history to keep.

Each ring has a slightly different personality and we added the small diamonds to the bands, keeping in mind that they will be passed on the four different women. 

The ring with the largest diamond has no small stones, the two with the medium sized diamonds have two in each band and the smallers diamond has three small additional diamonds.

Having diamonds in this new design from both antique rings unites my customer's mother and grandmother forever. 

The rings are made in combinations of platinum, rose gold and yellow gold and they can be stacked together in many different ways, worn in pairs or worn individually.

 

The Cairn ring commission was really special and I wanted to show you some pictures of the stages of the ring being designed and made.

After discussing the design concept with my customer she visited my studio to try on different widths of rings, see the ring profile shapes and allow me to measure her finger. She also left her diamond rings so I could use them in the commission.

I then spent time looking at natural pebble shapes. I selected four I really liked and laid them out, looking at them top down and from the side.

I then used these real pebbles as a visual guide to create unique shapes that I hand carved in blue wax. The shapes were never intended to be direct copies but simply to help me create the curves and angles that were similar to shapes found in nature.

After forming four unique shapes that I liked, I checked how they looked on top of four silver bands. Wax can look clumsy and not as elegant as polished metal but I am so used to working with it that I can now visualise how these shapes with look with reflections.

Once I was sure the shapes were correct, these wax pieces were cast in platinum and gold. The wax shape is encased in plaster and once the plaster is set, the wax is melted out leaving a shape identical to the wax. Precious metal is heated and then poured into the space.

When you make a one of a kind piece in wax, there is always a chance that the cast will not work and then you have to start from scratch remaking the wax. Fortunately this didn't happen with any of the four pieces that were made.

The shapes were then given a rough polish and a layout for the way they would stack was finalised before they were soldered onto the bands.

The customer then visited my studio again to try the rings on before the diamonds were set and to check she was happy with the finger size and that the design was as she had imagined.

The rings were then independently tested by the Assay Office who apply hallmarks to precious jewellery.

The rings were then given another polish. They were then set with the diamonds.
After diamond setting, the rings were given another polish which is the last and final stage of the whole process.

Each commission is unique and each one takes a different length of time to perfect.

What I really loved about this commission was that at the stage when my customer tried the rings on before the diamonds were set, it was Mother's day and given that we were remodelling her mum and grandmother's rings it felt like fate. I had messaged her on Saturday and by coincidence she was in the area on Sunday. One of the great things about our studio is the flexibility to visit it any day of the week.