The Husband made our rings when we got married and this is him holding mine. It was quite a process. We started by taking a class in jewelry making using the lost cast wax method. Then we went around to pawn shops and bought broken chains and rings to use the gold in them to melt down to make the rings. Then he sat at the kitchen table and carved the forms for the rings out of a special kind of wax. He wore these big, funny magnifying glasses so he could really see what he was doing. Then he would hang the wax rings upside down in a square form and pour a special plaster into the form around the wax rings. Then he would heat the resulting block of plaster so the wax rings would melt and drip out. This would leave a hole in the plaster that was the same shape as the original wax rings.Then he would melt down the gold in a ceramic dish with the blow torch and pour the molten metal into the plaster form. After everything cooled down, the molten metal became solid again, he would wash away the plaster, leaving the rings, now made of gold.
He wasn’t happy with results the first few times he made them, so he would make some more wax rings, another form, melt down the gold, and pour the rings again. This went on for weeks before the wedding, and I was just about convinced that we would have to go buy some rings. Then just three days before the wedding, he got the results he wanted.
To me, the making of these rings is kind of symbolic of marriage in general. It takes some preparation, some practice, a lot of patience, a little bit of cussing, and a lot of perserverance to get the results you want.
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