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Held within our fully equipped silversmithing studio in the Historical Jewellery Quarter come and spend a day hand crafting your own wedding bands. You will have exclusive use of the workshop, expert tuition from an experienced and friendly jeweller and two totally unique and very special wedding rings.
How To Design Your Own Custom Engagement Ring
When crafting your rings you will be expertly guided through each step and given all the help you need. Starting with design and moving on to heating, shaping, hammering, soldering and finishing. We then send your rings off to be hallmarked and any finishing necessary is completed by us such as an extra polish or arranging engraving so that your handmade bespoke rings are perfect.
Your workshop experience includes our guidance, practice metal and materials, hallmarking, photos, finishing and ring boxes to keep your jewellery safe. When booking we will discuss the materials you'd like to use so we can order these ahead ready for the day, the materials are at an additional cost.
Find out more about material options and designs, including shaping rings to fit around engagement rings and working in platinum please take a look at our Guide to Making Your Rings
Unique And Unusual Wedding Rings
We want to create a memorable experience at the workshop, one which you will always cherish together. So we will provide plenty of complimentary teas, coffees, and nibbles, a bottle of bubbles to take home and decorate the workshop with flowers. Have a look at our guide for places to stay, eat & drink
During the workshops we often get to chat about all the exciting plans for the big day and many of our brides and grooms wonderful weddings are featured online, we think we must get as excited as them when we get to see all the wonderful pictures and happy moments and especially when there are a few snaps of the rings!
Jennie & Andy Jeff & Jo Vicky &Gareth Cadi & Dan Amy & Neil Hannah & Simon
Bespoke Wedding Rings
We had a wonderful day making our wedding rings with you. It has truly been a highlight to the run up of our wedding. You were very helpful and friendly, the teas and cakes were a lovely little touch and we felt relaxed and comfortable to enjoy the experience. Making our own wedding rings has made them all the more priceless to us and we would recommend the day to anyone wanting to add a personal touch to the rings, it was an experience that wont be forgotten
'We had a wonderful day in the workshop making our rings. From start to finish the experience was fantastic and Victoria's help and guidance was brilliant. It was a wonderful way to spend some time together as a couple creating memories that we won't ever forget- thank you so much!'
We have had so many nice testimonials we had to create a new page for them- you can read more here testimonialsFor many, the thought of going into a shop to spend more money than they've ever spent on one piece of jewellery before, is daunting enough. Selecting from rows and rows of seemingly similar (yet vastly different) sparkling stones can be overwhelming.
Custom Engagement Rings
But suggest that a prospective groom doesn't even choose from anything in front of him, but instead dreams up his own design and it can quite frankly be enough to push him over the edge. Even if the bride offers her assistance (more and more couples are now opting to choose a ring together), it can still seem an impossible task, no matter how clear an idea you might have of what you want.
So where to start? When choosing to design an entirely unique ring, it's important to find a talented expert who does the right amount of hand-holding, while still inspiring you to design an ambitiously individual piece of jewellery. We spoke to some of
Jessica McCormack is the fashion industry's darling; editors have developed an addiction to her blackened finishes, punk-Georgian settings and her eye for selecting fiery, characterful stones. McCormack has engagement rings available to purchase as they are from her Mount Street boutique, will happily transform inherited heirlooms into new pieces, and also encourages her clients to select loose stones to propose with, so that brides can come in and design their own unique settings. Lots men have an important jewel, something from their mum or grandmother, but they want to add a part of them to it too – just giving their bride the original ring feels too much like a shortcut, she explains.
Design Your Own Mens Wedding Band. Mens Wedding Ring Mens
McCormack presents various examples to her clients, gradually opening their minds to different levels of unusually beautiful settings not found elsewhere. We take it step by step, it's a little journey, she says. Her clients often come in with sketches, paper tears, screen grabs or a moodboard, much like you might design a wedding dress. Sometimes I've seen people get much more stressed about their wedding dress, she points out, but you're wearing that for one day – you are going to wear this for the rest of your life.
Her bespoke pieces range from dainty bands of round stones that spell out secret messages, such as her own ring, which reads my love using the first letter of each gemstone type. Another popular purchase is the party jacket, often bought to upgrade wedding jewels; surrounding an engagement ring with a blazing, jagged halo of diamonds.
The Brazilian designer Ara Vartanian (a favourite of Kate Moss) has a fairly new Mayfair store and is gathering a cult following for his bespoke service. I always want my wedding rings to be coded to the couple, he says. A wedding band is probably the only piece of jewellery you will wear 24/seven after you're married, and your child might even wear it after you. Vartanian's own wedding bands are enough inspiration alone – they follow the zigzag line of his and his wife's heartbeats on an electrocardiogram monitor, and the two rings slot together when stacked as one, which he describes as a coded connection.
Make Your Own Wedding Rings — The Jewel And The Jeweller
All the wedding bands I create click together in one way or another, he explains. Vartanian likes to meet with the couple and ask a whole host of questions – the date they met; where they were born; how long they have loved each other; which countries they have travelled to. Songs are often sources of great inspiration for me, as I use the patterns created by the written melody to design something entirely unique for them, he says. Vartanian also experiments with black diamonds and topsy-turvy gems, setting them upside-down to create sharp, scintillating bands.
If you feel like starting completely from scratch is a step too far, Mappin & Webb's 'By Appointment' service offers a simple, straightforward design system to create a made-to-measure engagement ring.
Customers can choose from seven signature ring settings and select their preferred type of gold and stone, before refining the size, cut and colour of diamond. You can go into a store to create your design, or play jewellery designer from the comfort of your sofa, fiddling with carat and sparkling settings with Mappin & Webb online tools.
Create Your Own Custom Engagement Rings
Bear Brooksbank excels at reinventing jewellery – taking heirloom pieces and transforming them into contemporary engagement rings – saving them from a lifetime of lingering in a dusty safe. I start by asking customers what makes the piece special, which parts, whether stones, metal or shapes, would they like to use in the new ring? she explains. It's up to the couple, whether they want an extreme change or just a subtle update.
Previous pieces Brooksbank has worked on include a sapphire and diamond cluster ring mounted in platinum, which had belonged to the groom's grandmother. The bride was a yellow-gold girl, so I encouraged her to go for it, while keeping the grandmother's stones. Another commission used gems from a brooch that the groom had been given by his mother to make a ring for his wife-to-be; he was given half of the diamonds and his brother received the other half.
If, however, you're struggling to see a new lease of life in great aunty's fussy brooch, you don't have to arrive with a fully formed plan. I always say just come with as many or as few ideas as you want, she explains. As soon as you meet a couple you start to build a picture of who they are, and designing a piece that you think encapsulates their love is a real privilege.
Design Your Own Diamond Ring Online
Engraving has long been a popular choice for wedding jewellery, with dates, initials and small messages often hiding beneath the surface. Daniella
