The Storyteller's Ring: Custom Wedding Ring Design
Custom wedding band design can be a challenge for a custom storyteller.
My client is a professional storyteller. Travels the world telling stories. One day, love brought him to our studio - he and his wife wanted a new wedding ring that told a story. He weaves his stories under the stars and moon, in front of a campfire - so romantic we used it as our theme for his story teller's wedding band.
Our first step is to draw the layout for the design on the wax. We use white-out and painted directly onto the wax. With the use of technology, we quickly recorded the design and emailed the video for our client to review.
In a matter of minutes we received the client's approval.
Next step was to carve the designs into the wax ring.
Wax Carving the Model
As you can see there are mountains, big skies, stars, moon and fire with smoke tendrils - all representing elements of a story tellers evening in front of a campfire.
Casting the Waxes
Once the wax has been approved and polished, the model is sprued onto a rubber base. The sprue will act as a channel for the metal to flow into. The model, once attached to the rubber base is placed within a crucible and investment (like plaster) is poured into the form. It is air dried then placed in a heated kiln for several hours until all of the wax burns away. The metal is melted and poured into the cavity inside the plaster.
Once the metal is cooled the investment is broken away and the cast item is ready to be finished. In the following pictures you will see the cast ring before clean-up.
Shown above is the sterling silver casting fresh from the oven. The casting looks fairly clean due to the fact that I polish my wax carvings before casting. A clean wax reduces the time it takes to finish a raw casting.
Setting the Gemstones
Next the gemstones are flush set into the silver band. The final touches are added to the patinaed silver and brushed finished.
Each view of our design is unique: the storyteller rings shows us a vision under an orange “Harvest Moon”, a few starry diamonds twinkle in the night sky and a blue “star” diamond over a mountain range.
