Dani's engagement ring

Dani's engagement ring

We only spent just about forever (i.e., more than a year) working on designing the ring, so I guess I better show it off. Here are some pics.

Oooooooooooooooo. Here's the final product, but it was a long road getting here.

Sketches
Below are a multitude of sketches I found around the house that we made designing the ring. There are more than these; I just happened to gather a handful together and then only put about half of those on this page. I'm sure some of the cocktail napkins and gum wrappers with other designs were lost over that time.

Here are some concepts we tried:

The ones on the top right is an experiment at having a bridge design mixed with a method for keeping three stones above it (i.e., diamond plus two satellite sapphires). Obviously, this would have been a bit gaudy, but the plan was just to test the concept then streamline the design.

On the lower right is a tension setting that Dani liked. I always pushed for a tension setting (no pun intended), and we ran across a design similar to this at one point, also this doesn't show that we've done anything special with it.

The rest seem to be clueless experiments.

Top: More attempts to cram three stones on top with a tension setting. Note that the ring itself is an inverted omega. That was intentional, although there wasn't any significance.

Bottom: More (extreme!) tension settings, some incorporating bridge designs.

Although these aren't in chronological order (since I honestly don't know anymore which came before the others), but I think we abandoned the bridge design by this point. We seem to be trying to figure out how to incorporate the side stones.

CAD
Finally, here are the CAD renderings of an intermediate version of the final design based on sketches by Kim Gillespie of Gillespie Jewelers who also made the actual ring.

We narrowed some sections and eliminated the second sapphire on either side (The latter weren't supposed to be there, but turned up anyway.)

Original side view.

Edited (by us) side view. We removed the second stone. The diagonal lines are to indicate that we wanted the band to be slightly narrower.

The CAD software has gotten so fancy these days that the light source actually shines through the sapphires and diamond... although it doesn't defract.

The Final Product.
Finally, here are some pics of the actual ring.

Not only can we design rings... Sometimes we can even take pretentious-looking pictures as well!

Straight-on view.

Here's the ring on its intended piece of real estate. Location really is everything.

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