I went to pick up our wedding bands from the custom jeweler today. Originally the jeweler had told us he was going to make wax casts for us to try on/look at in three weeks, and then he'd make them. I tried calling several times around three weeks and when I finally got ahold of him, he said that the rings were almost ready, and he had no recollection of talking about the wax. I was surprised but hey, cool that the rings are almost ready, right? ;)

Things he got right:

• the interwoven knotwork pattern
• the pattern being two different colors on a third color for the background

Things he got wrong:

• there was a very large border when we specified that we didn't want a border
• the ring was flat when we specified we wanted rounded
• the colors were in the wrong places: we asked for the knotwork to be white gold and red gold, on a yellow gold background. He made it red gold and yellow gold on a while gold background, which makes it very hard to see that the colors are different.
• he'd agreed to the knotwork being inlayed with wire, but instead the knotwork was added on top

Miscommunication or mistakes are one thing, but we talked about all of the above in detail, discussed examples, he put pictures of similar things and notes in a file for us...

Patri's going to go talk to him tomorrow. I'm glad he says I don't need to go: the idea of the confrontation is more stressful to me than the problem ;) As Patri said, "its just such a waste!!" They put all of this effort into making these custom rings and don't even bother reading their own notes!!

Either that or they decided what we asked was too difficult (it is more difficult) and just decided to do what they knew how rather than admitting that they couldn't do it. Perhaps after trying or perhaps even when they were making the promises. I hate to think that poorly of people, but really, I would not have believed that someone professional with a degree and still in business would be as irresponsible as this guy, so who knows. When I went to pick up the rings he spent a lot of time telling me how much work they'd put in.

I really hate it when people make promises they can't keep in order to get what they know you wouldn't give them if they were honest and then try to "make it okay" by attempting to make you feel sorry for them.

To his credit, the ring is pretty, just not what we wanted. And not what we want to wear every day for the rest of our lives ;) As Anna said, since they are rings we're going to be wearing for the rest of our lives, if it takes longer than the wedding date to get them, so be it, we can use other rings for the ceremony if need be.

The other annoying thing is that my fingers have swelled. That's normal for pms, but pregnancy is sort of like pms that doesn't end in that aspect (and others ;), so I can no longer wear my engagement ring comfortably. I'm going to get this ring a 1/4 size larger than the engagement ring, but that will still be to small for when I'm pregnant, and may be a little on the large size for when I'm back down to size. Maybe we should have gone with my old idea of tattoo rings ;)