Wedding Rings

This weekend we were down at Coburg studios in Leith with Donna making our own wedding rings. It was a really awesome day, one of the best things we have done in all our wedding planning. I loved how personal it was, I spent a lot of time filing and polishing mine during which I imagined it on my new Husband's finger.

We started off with two pieces of gold that we had picked out in September.

I picked a thin flat 18 carat white gold band that could easily fit under my engagement ring and Rodney an 9 carat D shaped white gold band. He preferred the white gold to the yellow gold, the lower carat white gold still had a warm look to it but avoided they blingy look of the yellow gold.

We heated them up with a blowtorch and then put them in some warm acid for a clean. The next step was to file one end completely flat, which was easier said than done.To add to the pressure of getting it right, I made Rodney's ring and he made mine!



We then measured the gold to exactly the right length for our ring sizes. Thank God for Donna at this point who checked mine and realised I had measured 54mm not 64mm, oops!!



Next we cut them to the correct size and made sure the newly cut end was completely flat as well. Then we could start bending them into a ring shape. Rodney did mine nice and quickly but I struggled a bit because Rod's ring was thicker and curved, you will notice this becomes a theme!



At this point they were rough and ready but resembled a ring, and were ready for soldering.



The soldering was my favourite part, we used the blow torch again with some flux and a little bit of solder. The rings ended up bright red which was really cool. After soldering you dip them in cold water and they are automatically cool enough to touch, took me a while to trust Donna on that one!



After they were soldered they go back in the warm acid for a little while for a clean, and then we gave them a good wack to get them into a perfect ring shape.



Again I found it more difficult because it was thicker gold, but I got there in the end, and it was some good stress release!



By this stage our rings were looking a lot better, they just needed to be cleaned up a bit.



We were ready for a well deserved lunch by this point, and settled down to a load of M&S goodies, the biscuits were particularly amazing! I was glad of the refueling because next came the filing which for me was the most frustrating part of the process. Because Rod's ring is D shaped I had to be careful when I filed it not to lose the curve and to keep it nice and smooth. This resulted in me having to re-do the filing a few times, it was good having Donna there to quality control and make sure I stuck with it to get the results I wanted.

Rodney was already way ahead of me by this point and was onto the sanding before I had finished the outside, which he took great pleasure in telling me!

Luckily that meant I got to use the machine for sanding while Rodney did it by hand. We used increasingly fine sandpaper on the outside and inside of the ring to take make it smooth and shiny.



Rodney decided to go for a matt finish for his ring, so the outside was done when I had finished sanding it, But we still needed to polish the inside. Rodney on the other hand needed to polish both sides of mine. We used a different attachment to the same machine we used for the sanding and two different kinds of polish.



Then Rodney used a big polishing machine to do the outside of mine, and I scratched the outside of his with a scouring pad and bada bing bada boom we were done.



In time for some bubbly and the obligatory cheesy picture.



It was such a lovely day, and I was never worried that they wouldn't come out well because Donna did such a good job teaching us, watching over us and stepping in when we were struggling. It was really great to see the transformation from two sticks of metal into the rings we will exchange in May.

To any other Scottish Brides and Grooms I can't recommend the day enough. We paid for the gold and £250 to Donna for the use of the studios and her wisdom and it worked out only marginally more than what we would have paid on the high street. Here's the website again incase your interested http://www.makeweddingrings.co.uk/.

What did you guys get up to this weekend? Anybody else done any jewelry making?