Claire and Georg, celebrating their engagement
Claire is a friend from way back. In fact my parents have been friends with her parents since we were infants. Claire and I became close in high school, when a year in between grades becomes a little bit less significant. We often spent time together watching movies followed by eating diner sundaes. After I moved to New York, I was delighted when Claire followed a few years later, becoming a teacher in the NYC school district. We now live a ten minute walk from each other in Brooklyn.
Besides being a very dedicated teacher, Claire is also a very talented photographer, with a specialty in street photography. Her portfolio is on flickr, and she has some amazing photos there. Really, check out her photos.
Through the photography community, Claire had the good fortune to meet Georg, another talented photographer. After admiring each others' photos, it came to be that Claire and Georg met, when he visited NY from Germany, and they also fell in love with each other! This is such a wonderful turn of events, that I get watery-eyed even writing about it.
I was so honored and delighted when I received a message that they had become engaged, with a request for me to make a suitable engagement ring. I immediately thought of the ring shown above, mostly due to a ring that Claire loves to wear, passed down to her by her mother, and this ring leads to yet another layer of this family story.
Claire's mother, Paula is from Portugal, and her father is from Germany. They met while studying English in London. After meeting, Paula left to work in Mozambique, and Claire's ring is a memento of her mother's time in Africa. While she was in Africa, she was writing to Paul, and they had their own long-distance love story. Eventually, they were reunited, married and moved to my hometown of Racine, WI.
Paula is possession of gold British imperial coins, which were passed down to her by her relatives, so I was requested to make the ring the ring out of this gold and I readily agreed. As the coins very high karat gold, when I made the recipe for the gold for Claire's ring, I had the choice to make a redder color of gold, matching the color of the ring from Mozambique.
With all of these various strands coming together, as they do for all couples, making wedding bands is a wonderful things indeed!
