The making of a bespoke PIKE ring

At PIKE, we specialise in designing jewellery for individual customers and hand making the beautiful designs. Many people are unaware of how complex and fascinating the process can be, and this blog post shares one of our recent commissions. The ring we are sharing has much sentimental meaning for the customers, and we were honoured to be a part of this beautiful process with them.

Many of our customers come to us with small collections of jewellery that have been given to them, or that they are no longer wearing. They tell us that the jewellery sits in their drawer or their safe and that they need some ideas of what to do with it. Nicholas can often see a new design before customers have left the workshop!

Our customer mentioned her love of Art Deco. Nicholas kept this in mind as he drew a number of concepts for the customer to look at – she chose the bottom design.

And then the making begins! We always start with raw metal and Matthew begins the manufacturing process, using techniques that have been used for many hundreds of years.

These are the bezel settings that will hold the larger diamonds in place.

 The design calls for Matthew to use raw metal in plate form to create the overall shape of the ring.

The bezels are soldered on to the plate.

The top of the ring is cut and carefully filed out of the plate.

Next comes the undercarriage…

and the band.

And then it all has to be soldered together – carefully!

After the diamonds have been set, it’s time for the hand polishing…

masking the yellow gold with nail polish in preparation for the rhodium plating…

rhodium plating, and then…

The beautiful finished ring.

We take progress photos of every piece we hand make at PIKE, and each customer walks away with a provenance report that they can keep to show family and friends. We love being able to share our process with people, and we look forward to sharing it with you.