Making wedding rings

This weekend, Andrew and I made our own wedding rings. We’ve been married for several years, but we never got around to getting rings. We found out about a guy in NYC who does ring-making workshops: you come to his studio and spend a day making personalized, custom rings. It was fun, and now we have very special rings!

Here’s what we started with at 10am:

We made each other’s bands, so Andrew used the thin piece and I used the thick piece. The long strip was for the side rails.

We were using palladium, which we had to anneal (make hot) to make it bendy. When palladium gets hot it turns purple, which is interesting:

Once it was bendy, we used pliers to bend it into something roughly ring-shaped:

It was more D-shaped, but the point was just to connect the ends, which we soldered together:

After some shaping, we had to hammer the bands so that we could get the “beaten” appearance we wanted:

We had to re-anneal the rings several times while beating them, so they wouldn’t get brittle:

Then we had to create two more “rings” for rails and stick everything together with solder:

Finally we polished the things:

It took us twelve hours, but I think they came out pretty good:

I highly recommend it as a fun and romantic way to get wedding rings.