My Wedding Ring

In 2007, I went on a cruise with the extended Glauser family. There was a jewelry store on board the ship, and I fell in love with a ring there. I debated and debated about buying it for my some-day wedding ring since it was a good deal (I think it cost a few hundred?), but at the time I didn't have much money and I was getting ready to move to Germany, so I opted for just taking a picture, thinking I'd forget about it eventually. I didn't forget.



This is the amazingly beautiful pave filgree ring.

I've spent a lot of time over the years trying to find that ring, but the dang cruise company wouldn't hand over any information about the vendor, and pages and pages of Google images using different search terms were unsuccessful.

So when Michael and I decided to get married in 2012, I talked to some companies about making the ring. In short, I should have bought the ring on the cruise ship. Having it custom-made was pricey and a bit of a challenge.



One company came up with these models for me. I only felt somewhat guilty when I then gave these models to someone who would give us a better price.

Since Michael's aunt works at a huge jewelry wholesale place in San Francisco, she was able to connect us with a new jeweler. He gave us a good estimate and said he could get it done quickly enough for us to have it at our wedding in less than a month.

I had done research about precious metals and found that the reason some cheap rings turned my finger green and made my ears infected was because they had nickel in them. Apparently nickel is often used to make gold white, so I asked him to make my ring with palladium instead, which seemed like a good substitute according to everything I'd read online.

Unfortunately, he'd never worked with palladium before, and apparently it is a really brittle metal; he had to redo the ring a couple of times. Also, his English sometimes made it difficult for us to communicate well, and either he didn't understand or he didn't agree that the leaves or flowers in the pattern were rounded, so they came out flat. When I asked that he at least give them the same matted finish that I could see in the picture of the ring from the cruise ship, he did some polishing thing that then exposed lines in the metal. Also, somehow the metal looked more like sterling silver, which put a damper on things; nevertheless, it is a beautiful ring.






I was so scared about having the ring be too tight at some future date (I'd read that it's harder to get off wide rings) that I asked for him to make it bigger, but then it was pretty loose on my finger. Wearing it was weird at first because it's so heavy.




Sorry it's so difficult to get a good picture of such a tiny object.

Sadly, the ring has cracked multiple times since we got married and some of the tiny diamonds along the edge have fallen out, so I've stopped wearing it. The jeweler promised he would fix it for us for the rest of time, but we've asked him to try re-doing the whole thing. Michael's aunt gave me a tiny white gold band to wear to see if my skin would be okay, and it's been fine, so here's to hoping that a re-do in white gold will be better.