Wedding Rings! With Moustaches!

I recently received a request from a friend to make some custom silver moustache wedding rings. I think this has to be the bestest idea for wedding rings I have ever heard :)

Anyway, the original design brief was a silver band, with a heart cut of out one side and a twirly villain moustache cut out the other side. Awesome, thinks I. All I have to do is purchase unfinished wedding bands in the correct size, do the cutouts with tiny sawblades, polish, and done. Simples. No soldering, nothing. Take me a day, tops.

Of course, the designs you think will be the simplest often turn out to be completely horrible to make. Mainly because I am an idiot. For some reason, it didn't even occur to me that trying to saw out a shape from an already constructed ring would be nigh on impossible, due to the fact that the OTHER SIDE OF THE RING is in the way of the sawblade. Duh... The fact that I also chose lovely chunky thick bands did nothing to help the situation.

Anyway, I battled on with the heart cut outs, holding the saw at a ridiculous angle to avoid cutting into the other side. There were some dark mutterings, some occasional swearing and several broken sawblades. After much filing and all the fingers on my right hand going numb, I had the hearts finished. Now they looked okay, but a heart is a pretty fluid and organic kinda shape. A curly moustache, not so much. It was becoming apparent that there was no way I would be able to cut the moustache out of the other side and, with but days to go until the wedding, I had to make an executive decision to alter the original design and cut out the moustaches separately and solder them to the ring instead of cutting them out, which I felt pretty bad about, as I was no longer sticking to the original design given to me. I knew if I persisted with the cut outs, the rings just wouldn't look good though, and I would have felt terrible handing something over that I knew wasn't good enough.

Anyway, amidst the trauma, I managed to take a couple of pictures of work in progress. I also wound up deciding to make little frames for the heart cutouts, so the whole design matched and it wasn't like one side was cut out and one side was soldered on.

And just look at the tiny moustaches - I'm totally going to make more of these and turn them into earrings and bracelets and necklaces and anything else I can think of to put moustaches on!

And the finished rings:

Really happy with how they turned out, despite having to change the original design.

And some more pictures. The rings photographed pretty well, so I couldn't decide which shots to use. So I'm posting them all...