Der Ring

So I’ve sort of strayed a bit from the original purpose for this journal. (The wedding....) ~Bridezilla Schmidezilla!

I realized the other day that I had failed to shower praises upon our favorite custom jeweler, Charley Hafen. I can’t believe how fortunate we were to finally find a jeweler that we clicked with. And let me tell you we did our homework! Charley was actually referred to us by a friend who knew him from the days when Charley’s shop was located at Trolley Square. His gallery now independently stands in Sugarhouse. After all our valley wide searching, there he was all that time, just a half block from our home! So here’s how it happened.

When we decided we wanted to get married (we had an adult discussion about it—none of this archaic getting on one knee nonsense) I didn’t have to have a ring, but Jon was all for it, and hey, who am I to argue? I say this in all honesty, and people often still don’t believe me, but I never had any childhood fantasies about how my wedding would be or what my ring should look like. I had a few ideas about what I liked based on some looking I did last year with my girl Brooke when she & her now husband were looking at rings. But beyond some basic knowledge, I knew nothing. Neither did Jon. So we started doing a little research on the web, made a few calls around town to see who our friends knew, and then ventured into some jewelry stores. It was awful! You know that icky feeling you get when you are looking at used cars and a hairy, porn star looking guy who smells like cheap cologne is leering at you? Yeah, it was that gross. Apparently the jewelry business is extremely competitive and we heard just about every come-on there is. We looked at some pieces and there are a lot of beautiful things out there but nothing stole our hearts. Until we looked at tension rings. Tension rings are uniquely beautiful and we looked at a couple of different designers. As for diamonds, well, I don’t have any family heirlooms, and neither does he, so we needed to invest in a stone as well. I was and remain a ‘quality not quantity’ type of gal. I would much prefer a smaller stone that is finer and less flawed than a large, dull diamond. We checked out the tension ring dealers in town and boy they are pretty. But then I got a little gun shy and decided I didn’t want my center stone so vulnerable that it could potentially get ripped out of its setting. I’m pretty hard on my stuff (playing with the dogs, digging in the dirt, fiddling with doodads on my motorcycle, etc.) so I’m not really well suited for a delicate piece of jewelry.

So one day Jon stopped by Charley’s shop on his way home from work. He went in and chatted with Charley and was impressed with his mellow, friendly demeanor. He explained to Jon how he would hand craft the ring, make a wax mold, allow us to ‘proof’ it, and then cast it in gold (white gold was our choice). We showed Charley pictures of some of the rings we like, and with the photos he was able to design a unique composite sample incorporating elements of all the different styles we liked. Since we didn’t have a stone yet—the centerpiece of the ring—he said he would have his gemologist bring us a few samples. A few days later we went back to Charley’s shop together and chose the stone—a beautiful .9 karat princess cut (the clarity and color stats slip my mind at the moment—I’ll come back & insert in this post if I can locate the paperwork). Suffice to say it was a beautiful stone and we were eager to see it in our finished project. A week or so later we went back to see the wax mold. It was fragile and gave us an idea of what to expect, but we really had no idea how beautiful it would be in the end. Needless to say I showcase the bling every day and we are definitely very pleased with the outcome.