Rings

So, my sweetie left for Seattle a week and a half ago. I miss him very much, but at least I am no longer angry with him for leaving :-).

Prior to his departure, we bought wedding rings. It’s early yet, but it’s something we wanted to do together, so, like the engagement photos, it had to be squeezed in.

We went back to the jeweler on Diamond Row that my sweetie bought my engagement ring from. I thought, going in, that I wanted something that would match my engagement ring exactly: it has a rather ornate decoration on the sides of the ring, featuring tiny diamonds and milgraining. It’s beautiful, very vintage-looking. I wanted something like this to match:
(Picture from wedding-band-ring.com)

The jeweler did not have anything exactly matching in stock, so she sent a runner to go find something. He took my engagement ring with him, which, let me tell you, freaked me out. I have no idea where he went; my sweetie kind of suspects he visited every other store on the street to try to buy something. Who knows? The little window into the diamond business this whole experience has given me is completely fascinating.

Anyway, he came back with a “casting”—that is, a white gold ring setting with no diamonds in it. It was also a really dull gray color, since it hadn’t been polished. This is how the rings arrive from the manufacturer, and the diamond stores then set diamonds in them, polish them, etc. It was totally cool, and really ugly :-). It was very similar to my engagement ring, but it was very hard for me to get a good idea of what the two rings would look like on—the casting was kind of chunky, and it was hard to tell if this was because the ring was fat, or because, without any diamonds set in it, the little prongs for them stuck out too much. And the dull gray color just wasn’t appealing. I guess I can’t visualize that well.

So, the jeweler offered a few other options. In the end, we picked a band with a row of tiny diamonds on top, and instead of diamonds in the side, it has some decorative scrollwork. More like this*:

(Picture from diamonds.com)

It’s not a perfect match, but it’s a slim little band, and looks nice snuggled up against my engagement ring, without distracting from it. I think they will be comfortable to wear together.

My sweetie picked a very plain yellow gold band. He is not a jewelry guy, and had literally no idea what he wanted the band to look like. When the jeweler showed him a few things, he very quickly narrowed it down to just about the plainest thing you could pick: 5 mm, comfort fit rounded yellow gold band. It was very him: he is not an adornment type:

(Picture from weddingbands.com)

Later, he confessed that part of why he liked the yellow gold is that it reminds him of his dad’s wedding band. Aww!

As I was trying on rings, I saw, to my acute embarrassment, that my engagement ring, after six months of wearing it, had become dirty to the point of looking gray next to the shiny new rings. So the jeweler sent me upstairs to have the ring cleaned and redipped in rhodium. This is the second time I’ve sat in a little room where jewelers were working away behind locked doors (the first was when I needed to get my engagement ring sized), and it was still totally cool to me. I love knowing that there are still thriving craft industries in Manhattan: we’re not all office and restaurant workers. Even better, the jeweler told me to come back the week before the wedding so that she could have it cleaned again to look beautiful in the pcitures!

* (I do not have pics of our actual rings because, to save the sales tax, they’ve been shipped to my sweetie in Seattle.)