Sophia and I knew that we were going to get married long before I asked her to marry me. One side-effect of this arrangement is the ability to shop for a ring together to make sure that it is exactly what she wanted.

For me, I always imagined offering a custom-designed one-of-a-kind ring to my love. A unique artifact which no other woman would have on her finger.

Sophia was quite fond of Tacori's elegant and sophisticated designs. However, by buying one of the existing Tacori designs we would be certain that the ring would not be of a unique design.

So... What do we do? Have Tacori make us a custom-made, uniquely designed engagement ring?

Yep.

With the help of our infinitely patient jeweler, Deja Laufer, we were able to come up with a one-of-a-kind custom Tacori design, based on the characteristics of a few of their existing rings.

We ended up really liking this ring:

The ring looked beautiful from the top, but we thought it looked rather empty from the side because of the inverse cresecent design. Instead of inverse crescents, we wanted full crescents, similar to this ring:

We also wanted a small rose-gold heart on either side of the center stone.

Pic coming soon

We worked out all of the details with Deja as best we could verbally and thru email. One question was still on our minds: What in the world would this frankenstein-of-a-ring look like? Well, with the magic of photoshop, I made a preview:

Not bad, eh? We sent this mock-up to Deja, and she sent it to Tacori so that we could be sure that everyone was on the same page.

Now, usually when you are having someone do some custom design job, they show you some sort of preview or blueprint of what they intend to build before they get started. Seems reasonable right? Well, after a week or two, I gave Deja a call and asked if they could send us some of their plans for the ring so that we could make sure all was going according to plan.

Deja gave Tacori a call with our request and learned that Tacori would be quite willing to send us the plans...for $300. Ouch. However, they could send us the "casting" for us to examine with no charge.

Thinking that a "casting" was little more than a mock-up of some sort, I agreed. A week later, I walked into Deja's shop to have a look at the "casting" and I was in for quite a surprise. As it turns out, a "casting" is actually the unfinished ring itself!

While it was really cool to have a look at (and have pictures of) the actual ring that would soon be on my darling's finger, asking for them to send us the ring before it was done ended up adding a week to the delivery time. Deja assured me that the ring would still be in my hand before the end of the month, and that was exactly what happened.

The ring was sent out on Thursday, March 27th, and arrived the next day. The ring was simply beautiful, looking quite different than the castings I had seen a few weeks earlier.