A tale of two rings

Do not be fooled by the title. This is not a tale of me getting another engagement ring, but rather how we came to end up with only two rings in the wedding process, rather than the usual three.

Yes, the custom currently is for three rings - engagement and wedding for the bride, and wedding for the groom. I've blogged about my engagement ring already, so I won't keep you hanging. The "missing" ring is the groom's.

Whilst it is not and never will be present, we don't actually consider it "missing." Other people do, and we've already had a few comments about it. As most people don't even know yet, I suspect we'll get a few more, including (unfortunately) some on the day itself.

Gadget does not want to wear a ring. The only jewellery he wears is a watch, and he considers this a gadget rather than jewellery! Quite early in our relationship, this somehow came up in conversation. I told him it was his decision, and if he didn't want one I was ok with it. Fast forward to the current day, and he is sticking with his decision - as am I. No ring for him, no problem for me.

It is, at most, a symbol of our relationship. He does't need to wear a ring to demonstrate his commitment to me. Plenty of men do not have rings (including Gadget's Dad, I think), and many of my colleagues from different cultural and religious backgrounds don't share this fourth-finger-left-hand tradition. If it wasn't for the comments, it would be a non-issue. I'm not sure I can ban it as a topic of conversation on the day though!

I have my wedding ring; we ordered it at the same time as my engagement ring. As that's the only thing it has to match, it seemed the sensible thing to do. I hear rumours that it's bad luck, but never mind. It's a plain platinum flat band - the whole 'no stones at work' issue again. (Note: I changed jobs today and it looks like I will actually be able to wear my ring in my job for the next six months! How exciting!)

The Church of England ceremony, from what I can tell, allows us to say "I give you this ring" and "I receive this ring." That suggests to me that the custom of both parties wearing a ring is not that old. Plus, if the church is ok with it, I think everyone else can manage!

The ring is in hand!

Not my hand unfortunately, but the next best thing. Inspector Gadget has it.

I know I posted a picture of the ring days ago, but that was taken in the jewellers. I don't actually have the ring on my finger (still). To save the 15% GST (=VAT), they have a system here where you can collect things at the airport as you fly out. Gadget is going to Sydney today for work (it's a hard life).

We got engaged on December 3rd. I finally ordered the ring on February 9th. We booked our reception on February 18th, and have now booked all the "big" things. The trip to Sydney was meant to be March, and kept getting delayed. We couldn't give the jeweller a definite time frame.

Gadget gets back in the early hours of Thursday morning. On Friday it will be one year before our wedding. I will not be wearing the ring until Friday - it cheesily feels like that's how it was meant to be.

First steps

The first steps in the planning process were baby steps. Before we actually got into the wedding proper, I needed to choose an engagement ring.

This was when we started to realise that we have NO IDEA how things work down here!

We've lived in Birmingham for many years, which is of course home to the fantastic jewellery quarter. Its easy to get things made there; I have friends who have travelled to Brum just to get their rings made.

Here there is no such thing. Added to that, NZ is a closed market. By that I mean - there's not many people here (less than there is in the West Midlands region), there's not much online shopping, and it's a long way to go for alternative options. Australia is our nearest neighbour, and that's a 3 hour flight. This means that a lot of things here are really expensive (we actually get books and dvds shipped from the UK!).

So I tried to cover all the options. I had 2 key criteria - it had to be platinum, and it had to have coloured stones with the diamond. I went into a few high street jewellers, but they didn't have any platinum rings. I did discover that solitaires look really silly on me, and so do thin bands (I've got quite long fingers).

Next was the ever popular google image search. This turned up some good eye candy, and a custom jeweller in Auckland. I came up with a design, but progress was quickly halted - they said there was no way I could have the kind of ring I wanted in platinum for my budget. Great.

Then came two very promising options. Crystalink in Birmingham were happy to deal with me by Skype and email, and came in within budget for my rough design. A friend then told me about her sister's jeweller in Auckland - he had some gorgeous rings, one of which was really similar to my imaginary ring. He also came in within our budget, and finally I was happy enough to order my ring.  And last week it was finished :-)

Thanks to Colin at Aurum Jewellers in Ponsonby.

(Note: as you'll see in the next few posts, I'd actually managed to book several wedding vendors before I got my ring - not sure how many people have achieved that!)