The rings cleaned up easily after the casting and the settings were so perfect that the stones went in smoothly. It's always such a treat to set something in 18k gold instead of 14k. The higher carat gold is so much softer and easier to bent against the stone. And the color is such a treat to the eye.
I love how the earth colored diamonds complement so well the warm colors of the 18K gold and the orange and green sapphire. Unfortunately the customer did not expect the diamonds to come in a range of colors. They had not seen my other listings and photos that show the entire earthy color range. They only looked at one photo that shows the ring set with one gray cube. I was asked to replace the colored stones with all light gray diamond cubes.
Lesson learned that there is never enough communication when it comes to custom orders. Something that is obvious to me might not be so obvious to the customer. Since the main goal is to have a happy customer, I had to do some research. It took me 2 weeks to actually find a couple more gray cubes in that particular size and in nice shapes.
Not all rough diamond cubes are perfectly shaped as a cube. They really are rough, they don't come all in the same even size like callibarted man-cut gem stones. Nature just does not work like that. To actually get a good set of 5 matching cubes I had do order a lot of more than 20 stones and then try each in the setting until I has happy with the combination.
The 18k setting fortunately was soft enough so I got all those colored diamond out without having to cut open the gold setting and having to solder a new setting one on.
Here the set with the all gray rough diamonds cubes.
I did use the rings as my submission for the RAW challenge and they became # 23 and #24. I also created some settings for 1, 3 and 4 stones. I will list those in my shop as I still find the off center setting with fewer cubes more intriguing than the row of 5 diamonds. This one will always be special for that happy couple.
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