I’ve made rings before, and I knew right from then that I wanted to make my own wedding ring. I wasn’t sure if there were places in Singapore that offered such workshops, and was super thankful to come across Fat Anvil Studios!
Also a special shout-out to my team-mate, who coincidentally also bought me a workshop voucher from Fat Anvil – it’s all fated!
We went down for a quick consultation session to decide on the ring design – they showed us a few different options, and one unique design, where two rings were crossed, caught our eye. They mentioned that no one else had picked it for a wedding band before, and we thought, it would be nice to be the first 😀 Also, the shape allowed me to stack my engagement ring with it, which was a bonus!
And my husband also very cleverly suggested that we go with yellow gold for one band, and white gold for the other – perfectly complementing my rose gold engagement ring, too ❤
After deciding on the design, we got our ring sizes measured, booked a workshop slot with them, and went down a month or so later to make it.
The workshop environment was really cost and lovely – we had the whole upper deck to ourselves, with our own private instructor guiding us at our private work station:
The first step was to anneal the gold by heating it, to make less hard so that we can get it into the right thickness
Bringing the gold strips to the right size was quite a fun(ny) activity – it’s somewhat like trying to make sugar cane juice (fellow Singaporeans will be able to picture a sugar cane store with a sugar cane being pressed through a machine):
There were various setting that they had set for us, to make sure the right shape (rectangular) and thickness will be achieved
Unlike the sugar cane machine which is automated, we needed to manually “wind” the machine to roll the gold strips through a few times to get them to the size we needed. This is us trying hard to do that (the gold had already been “softened” from the heat, but it still ain’t soft like a sugar cane) – took some effort, but definitely doable (and funny to laugh at each other while we were at it)
You might have noticed that one of the bands in the rings are textured – we created the texture by “hammering” the lines (with a soft hammer), after annealing the metal pieces again (we also do this to make it less hard, so we can work with it):
Textured surface on one of the pieces! (You can see there’s a lot of extra metal they provided for us, to make it easier to work with)
We then spent some time getting the piece of metal into a ring. The way to get the metal piece into a ring is to twist it into a band of the correct size, and cutting the excess away. This is where the size of the ring starts to matter, and the instructor was always on hand to make sure we were doing things right!
Sawing the band to get it into a ring shape
If you’ve seen my previous post on making a ring, you’ll understand how the soldering is done at the joint. We basically had to make two bands (one in yellow gold, one in white gold), before joining them:
Look a little dark from all the heating – but that’s ok cos that can be cleaned up!
I can’t remember what the liquid in there is, but it basically helps to clean up the dark stuff on the gold after we anneal it to soften the metal while we were working with it
After cleaning, it gets quite pretty! We held it in place (after getting them crossed at our preferred angle), and then soldered the two bands together:
Nice and shiny before more soldering!
This was a tricky step because we needed to put a tiny piece of solder at the joints (which isn’t a flat surface, unlike soldering the joint in a single ring), and melt that in:
I was lucky to get it done in 1 or 2 tries, my husband took a few more tries and help from the instructor
And when it’s done, we used something to polish the rings to give it shine! I forgot what it was, but it’s a dark coloured paste we put it on a polishing tool that spins really quickly, and there’s a risk of a bit of it splattering onto you – I was really lucky and indeed got some on my face :p
My husband’s ring on the left (not yet polished), mine on the right (polished) – can see the matt vs shine difference!
There was also an option to plate the white gold portion to make it look even shinier (like how white gold typically looks in the shops), but we kinda liked the way it looked after the normal polish (we also thought it looked nice with the texture we put on it), and decided to skip the plating option.
More photos of the rings:
Perfect crown for kitty
I usually wear it stacked on top of my engagement ring cos I love them all ❤
Or somedays when I’m lazy, I just wear this one
Photos of our wedding bands and engagement rings taken by our wedding photographers, AIRISU (yes, I bought him an engagement ring too, because equality) (yes, I bought him a pokemon ring because he loves pokemon)
We love how the rings turned out! So unique and special to us 🙂
The service was also amazing – my husband’s fingers somehow got skinnier after the first ring measurement (at the consultation), so after we finished making the ring and he tried it on, we realized that it was a bit too loose (he went down half or one ring size since the consultation!). They very kindly helped us to size the ring down after the workshop, and we picked it up another day.
We really love our rings, not just because we think they look good, but it’s super meaningful that we got to build them ourselves. I suppose it’s somewhat like marriage and life, where you appreciate something a lot more when you’ve worked for it!
Details of the workshop
Duration: 1 consultation session to discuss the design and measure the ring size (duration depends on how long you take to decide :D), and a 4 hour workshop to make the rings
Price: I paid $420 for the workshop fee, and an additional ~$500+ on the 18K gold for both rings. They quoted a higher price for a larger amount of gold, just to be make sure we have enough at the workshop, and “bought back” the excess gold from us
Level of “fun”: 4/5
This workshop had a strong design element (for those who choose to), and also a good mix of the use of different tools to work with gold (shape it, give it texture, bend it, solder it etc.).
Despite having made rings twice before this, I still found the workshop enjoyable, and it was my first time shaping the metal to the right size! 🙂
For people getting married, this is a really meaningful activity ❤
Level of difficulty: 3.5/5
The two most challenging parts of the workshop was:
when we had to shape the gold into the right thickness (this required strength – but definitely still doable!), and
when we had to solder the two rings together (the solder had to be at the right spot, before we melted it with the hand torch – sometimes, the flame / moving air displaces the solder, hence the two rings don’t stick together. I was lucky to get it within one or two tries for both corners, but my husband needed some help for the instructor to fix his!
The best thing about the workshop is that it’s basically a private lesson with the couple and the instructor, so whenever we have difficulties, the instructor was always on hand to guide us or intervene (to prevent any major mistakes :p). So any difficulties can be easily overcome with their help 🙂