Wedding rings that cost a quarter of a dollar.

One very common thread for our wedding is that most of the materials that we use are repurposed or recycled. For instance, I've cut up sheets to make bunting, we're rinsing out jam jars for vases, that sort of thing. But to me the most interesting, resourceful, and intensely cheap repurposization is our rings.

...I don't think that's a word, "repurposization."

I mentioned these rings in last night's lengthy post, but I wanted to expand on them a little bit and show you how they're coming along.

So I told you about the soldiers, how they'd hammer silver coins with the butts of their spoons and send them home to their sweeties. Leave it to the boys of the forties to come up with a brilliant, heartfelt idea like this, and leave it to them to also make sure it's dirt cheap.

I think I've got Rich's down to the right size and I've bashed mine for a lot of hours this afternoon. (My poor brothers and their poor ears.) Mine is about half way done. I'm a little bit nervous about the sizes...not so much mine, (maybe a little,) I have my engagement ring with which to compare, but I've had to go to rather ghetto lengths to figure out Rich's size. Before I left England, I wrapped a skinny, ring-sized slip of paper tightly around his knuckle and taped it... I've got his ring to where that paper JUST fits inside the beveled rim. I'm pretty sure that I can get it resized by a jeweler once it's all done, if need be.

Anyway, the way it seems to work is this: as the circumference of the quarter gets smaller the edge bevels and becomes thicker, and the inside of the ring is what was once the surface of quarter. Obviously, the smaller the ring size, the thicker the band, so because my finger is thinner than his, my ring will be fatter.

The ring I'm holding here is Rich's. The band is as it will be when it's finished...all I need to do for his is hollow it out which I am avoiding for as long as possible. My nerve are racked about it. The one on the spoon is my half-finished ring. I've still got a good few hours of hammering ahead of me and my knuckles are already bruised from repeatedly missing the quarter and smashing the daylights out of my thumb.

In this photo you can kind of see that the edges have beveled so that you can see the writing:

I've made a little more progress on the bottom ring, mine, since I took the photo this afternoon. I'm so excited to marry that boy! I'm glad that our wedding rings are going to be so personal and they will just speak volumes about us as a couple. We've worked hard to be together and we've worked hard on these rings. See the connection?

Tomorrow I'll be bashing US currency again. And I'm going to finish my bunting, and I'm going to get back into bag making for etsy. I'm actually going to try out an apron or two...I think I'll figure out a pattern on the fly, they can't be that hard to make, right?

Goodnight,
Laura