Jeni and Norm Wedding Blog
Do it Yourself Rings…
My husband and I made both our engagement rings and our wedding rings. For us this made sense given that we are both crafty and pretty much knew exactly what we wanted. It also saved us quite a lot of money!
Norman is a musician, but over the last 7 or 8 years has gotten into designing and fabricating really cool multi-layered plexi-glass clocks that he calls clockthings. They are inspired by different things, but mostly music, movies and Bollywood. He's made many over the years and has sold quite a few as well. Since he had a pretty big box of leftover scraps of plexi, he started making jewelry. He made some solid colored flat topped rings, a few multi-colored stacked round rings, and for Valentine's Day he made me a red ring with a clear heart that stood out from the front on wire (with our initials on it). I loved my Valentine ring, but couldn't wear it much as it was kind of big and also a bit fragile. A couple days after we decided to get married, I came home from work to discover that he had made us the perfect matching plexi engagement rings! The rings are identical except his is mansized and mine is tiny. They are clear bands with roman numerals of our wedding date carved into the side and highlighted with red. I wore my ring so proudly and was horrified when about 2 weeks before the wedding I got a solvent on my hand and my ring cracked and then broke! Not a problem though, he simply made me a new slightly thicker ring. That one has held up really well!
The 2 of us designed our actual wedding rings, and since I had been making gold and silver jewelry for about 2 years as a sideline to my job as a toy sculptor/painter, it seemed natural and fitting that I should make them. We decided that we wanted rings that incorporated 2 different metals, twined and fused together. I decided that we should use silver and 18k yellow gold, because those 2 metals fuse easily and because I knew this would mean I would never have to worry about my other jewelry matching my ring or not. I set about making the rings. I got the rod and started fusing. I was fusing away and all was well until I overheated the end of the twist and a small gap appeared! Because it was important to us that both rings be cut from the same length of fused twist, I ended up making a "happy accident" design decision. My ring has a small shallow diamond set into the place where the gap formed-seemed like it was meant to be- just like the 2 of us together.
You can check out Norman's clocks at www.clockthing.com and Jeni's jewelry at www.myspace.com/jennifertullwestberg
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