Love and Paper

A recent commission for his and hers 22k gold wedding bands. Congratulations R and J- Best wishes to a beautiful couple!

The brief was kind of challenging; crinkled paper texture on the surface, but thicker than actual paper and both rings to be cut from the same block (but different finger sizes...). I began by making a textured strip, parted that into two widths, then bent up the rings from those.

And then the join....! Now, how would you make an invisible join with an irregular texture? What I did was make a scarf joint, cut on a steep angle, which meant that the join had an irregular line on the face of the ring, that gets hidden in the crinkley texture. The solder used was ≈20k gold, with a slightly higher copper-to-silver ratio for a near-invisible colour match. ( I was not game to try fusion here- the texture would get melted...) The soldering had to be super-careful and the amount precisely judged, because I would not be able to clean up any excess from the face of the ring without damaging the texture...
Can you picture that?
No, its near-invisible.