The Ring

I knew I wanted to make Zoë's ring. I was only given one rule: no diamonds. Copy. She suggested turquoise a while back, but I didn't think that was engagement material so I searched for a sturdier stone that was blue. I stumbled upon the Montana Sapphire and thought it would be really cool, but how much cooler would it be if I found them myself?

I tossed the idea to my geologist friend, Logan and he was pretty ecstatic. Months later I dragged him to Helena, Montana for a weekend long trip to find Sapphires with no plan at all and several rock shops that had denied our request to take us digging on account of the ground starting to freeze. We lucked out and the one day of the month that the Helena Mineral Society was meeting was on the day we landed. We gathered some digging supplies and figured we'd try one of these shops before heading to the meeting. She was incredibly nice and understanding of the circumstance, but really couldn't offer a trip to dig so she called in a favor and that's when we met Tom Rockhound.

Tom Rockhound happens to own the largest virgin gravel claim on the Missouri River, he told us to meet him at his house at noon the next day and we were not late.

We ended up finding quite a few Sapphires and one that felt promising.

Photo

I stumbled into a random jewelry store in Olde Town Arvada and asked them if I could use their equipment to make a ring. A resounding "no" but they did suggest I reach out to this guy named Chapin.

Chapin turned out to be a stud jewelry designer and mettalurgist who helped provide feedback on my designs and a plan to get it done. This started a relatively long apprenticeship to forge the ring.

Having no ring making experience, Chapin suggested we start with silver so I don't make a very expensive gaffe. We made the ring and start of the tube settings and had a very rough "mock ring" before moving onto platinum.

Working with the platinum ended up being difficult, but it was great to have had the process down a little with the silver. I even ended up making the basket (that holds the primary stone) instead of ordering.

This was one of the most greuling parts. Not because it was difficuly, but beacuse if you got it wrong it was hard to recover from and might have had us going back to the drawing board.