make your own engagement ring | design her engagement ring | make your own wedding rings

1) I will be re-writing these questions soon.

2) What will be the total cost of the ring?

3) How can the quality of our rings rival professional jewelers?

Why haven't you re-written these questions already?

I don't have time. Besides, no one reads this page anyway.

What will be the total cost of the ring?

That's easy: what is your budget? We can make rings anywhere from $1K - $20K

The best way to know the exact price of your ring is to set a budget. It is much easier for me to tell you what you can do with, say, $4150 (2005 average, CNN) than it is for me to guess what price you want to hit.

Note: It will never cost you less to take my workshop than to have a ring made. If you want to save money more than take a workshop, let me know, and I will find a goldsmith to make your ring.

How can the quality of our rings rival professional jewelers?

It is understandable that my clients with no metalsmithing experience may doubt their ability to make professional quality rings. In fact, that was my greatest concern when I set up my business. I called in a few friends for test workshops and their rings turned out beautifully. Why?

Time & effort. Most wedding and engagement rings are mass-produced. The most popular engagement ring sold in the US is the six-prong solitaire, requiring just under an hour of labor. The production jewelers that make them get very fast at making the same thing over and over.

I put about 12 - 14 hours into each workshop. Add the 2 hours prep. and 8 hours labor that YOU will be putting into your rings, and you've got 16 - 20 hours per ring to pay attention to detail. The production jeweler can't compete.

The second factor working to your advantage is that you care about your own rings. Wedding and engagement rings are emotional pieces that mean a great deal to the owners. Try making 1000 rings and see how much you care about each one.

So what is professional quality? It varies. No ring is perfect, and I even see flaws in rings in catalogs, or in main display windows. The technical quality of the rings that my customers take out of my workshop is similar to what I see in jewelry shops. All of the customers that have sent me feedback have stated that the quality of their rings was both "excellent" and "better than what they had expected." And a few of my customers had to produce photos of their workshop to prove to their friends that they actually made the ring themselves.

If you are still concerned, make an appointment to visit my studio and I can show you examples of the quality of rings that you will make.