Going bespoke – Emerald dream ring
After spending my post university years in London learning under some top jewellery designers and being able to peruse the archives of Boucheron on Place Vendome, Paris, I gained experience working with high end bespoke pieces of jewellery. It is always a mega pleasure to apply my knowledge within RockCakes to create real investment pieces.
Word of mouth bought this awesome project to me with a brief to create an emerald ring that really packs a punch.
The budget was in the region of £8k so we had scope to create something truly awesome.
This was the first time that I worked on a cad design, always good to throw yourself in at the deep end, the majority of my work is created using traditional jewellery techniques.
The initial challenge was to source the perfect emerald, these stones can be temperamental with many on the market being treated with oil and full of inclusions, they can be fragile as they are a softer stone than sapphires or of course diamonds. The cost and value of an emerald is in the clarity – how pure / glass like the stone is, the colour – how deep the green is and the size, the carat weight of the piece. We knew that we wanted an emerald cut and looked at several stones before choosing a 4.88ct stone.
The emerald was scanned and we built the 3D cad design around the dimensions of the cut. The client had an idea of the style that she wanted which helped to get the initial aspects of the design in place.
The joy of working in cad is that we can easily tweak details of the ring, where and how the diamonds would be set, widths of the setting and shank, angles and length of the claws and hight of the ring.
Being able to 3D print a sample of the ring is super satisfying, it allows us to get a feel of the scale and see the details before committing in platinum.
We took our time and tried the ring on at all stages, from the 3D resin print to the platinum casting before the emerald and brilliant cut diamonds were set thus allowing any sizing tweaks to be done with no risk to the stone.
My aim in all projects is to communicate to the max so that myself and the customer are on the same page at all times.
Budgets vary vastly and this was one of the more expensive pieces that I have made. It was a long project and took about 3 months to complete, from finding the stone to delivering the final piece to the customer.
I keep lots of stones in stock which are super affordable and can source most things, I love a challenge! Want a bespoke piece? I’m here to help….
25/04/2022
Posted in: Jewellery Edit