Jewelry Redesign Story #6: Architectural Engagement Ring
Before and After
The Redesign Challenge:
Sofie is a wife and mother who has been wearing her engagement ring since the day her now-husband proposed. Besides being a family woman, Sofie is also a huge lover of art, design, and fashion with a particular eye for style, look, and feel. Sofie’s standards were set focusing on designs that are architectural, modern, and contemporary. Sofie knew that if she were going to continue to love her ring, she’d like for her current jewelry to be redesigned and updated to her current aesthetics.
Sofie sent us more than just her old ring, whose stones we would use for the redesign. Sofie also sent us some other jewelry pieces, including a diamond-set heart pendant and some gold jewelry and other gems that we were able to sell and deduct from the cost of her final piece.
The jewelry aside from the ring to be redesigned.
With a complicated redesign like this one, there were so many sketches to make! We also gave Sofie a number of options for her baguette cluster compositions.
sketches and final
Sofie sent us some inspiration photos of a modern baguette cluster ring and we set to work to create some initial idea sketches that would match her inspiration jewelry and fit with the current stones we had from her pre-owned pieces.
3-D models with the different settings - prongs and bezels
Rhino jewelry modeling
The Redesign Process:
We created two custom made cad options for Sofie: one with a bezel setting and one with a prong setting for the baguette stones. Together with Sofie we decided on the bezel setting to better protect the baguette stone edges.
Sofie still had choices to make in the jewelry redesign process: the shank setting itself. Sofie’s daily jewelry choices were especially important to consider in this case. Because Sofie wore two diamond eternity rings next to her engagement ring — and hoped to continue to do so — we considered setting the shank off-center for better stacking, but decided ultimately that a centered shank would have better balance.
Center vs. off-center shank placement.
Creating the Ring
Once Sofie made a decision and we knew that we could abide by all of her requests while also using the extra jewelry pieces she had given us, we were ready to go ahead with a final 3D design of the ring.
After that, the only things left to do were creating the 3D waxes and then creating the rather intricate casting in which the center diamond, baguette, and round diamonds would all fit.
Finally the casting was completed and all that was left to do was clean it, set the stones, and present Sofie with her new, redesigned and contemporary engagement ring.
The stone-free casting
The Redesign Revealed:
Sofie absolutely loved her new custom piece! She was so glad to finally have an engagement ring that fit her personal style and that also didn’t break the bank by allowing her to repurpose some of her old jewelry. An all-around win!
Finished piece on customer
Material: 14K white gold castings, 1.25ct round brilliant cut, G-H SI quality. 0.84 total carat 7 baguette diamonds, G-VS/SI quality 0.3 total carat round diamonds, G-VS/SI quality
Manufacturing level: Difficult
Design level: Difficult
Learn how you can re-use multiple old pieces of your jewelry here.
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