Sep 25, 2018
I love making dress rings, there aren't any restrictions around what you can design...and when making a bespoke ring for a client you can present a number of ideas to them and through discussion and drawing come up with something that is going to be perfect for them and exciting for me as a designer. My client was given this beautiful white Opal as a birthday present. It is a really good stone and she wanted a modern ring design to do it justice and to some extent show her friends how much she appreciated the stone as a present. I pitched to her '1970's Russian Kitsch' as the theme for the design. This is just a fun made up term I like to use. I have a fondness for 1970's European jewellery...I particularly like the dress rings from the company Grima in London, and a lot of the work of Italian and Greek jewellers of that time and ofcourse the Russian jewellers. I love the large scale, the use of texture and exotic stones, pearls, coral. It was an excessive period of design. As a designer I tend to design with a more minimal approach but I think just the use of white Opal kind of conjures up this older style of jewellery. The ring is also over sized. Its a big ring and when worn its going to attract attention. My client has a gregarious personality and I can see her now at parties talking about the ring and the origin of the stone.