Finally!

We found my rings this weekend! I'm so excited about it. On a tip from a friend who just got married, we took a trip down to Miami to the Seybold Jewelry Building. We've lived here for four years, but are so unfamilar with Miami that we didn't know this whole "jewelry district" even existed...besides this building there are tons of other jewelry stores and centres in this area. After a couple hours of browsing the different stores, trying on various styles and sets, we ended up in Richard's Gems and Jewelry, where we finally found something right.

It's a little hard to explain exactly what it looks like...we got a set with an engagement ring and a matching band. We chose the centre stone separately--Princess cut, .59 carats, graded H for colour and VS1 for clarity. On the sides of the engagement ring, and across the band, tiny round diamonds alternate with baguettes set lengthwise. Total carat weight is just over 1c. It kind of looks like the band in the picture below, except on my rings the stones are channelset with a thin milgrain edge:

The set we looked at was in platinum, but we chose to get it made in 14k white gold instead (what can I say...too much Thomas Covenant at too young an age set me on having white gold a long time ago). The ultimate effect is a little bit antique, a little bit modern--not too flashy or fussy but with more detail to discover after the first casual glance. We should have them in time for our trip to Ottawa, so I can start showing the engagement ring off to my family members then. When we get them, we'll take a picture so that we can post it here and you can see what they really look like.

Needless to say I am very glad we finally found the right rings. Between not having a ring, not having made a formal announcement of our engagement to many of our friends yet (we decided to wait until after our friends' wedding to spread the news openly), and not being able to make any concrete wedding plans before finding out the status of our UAE applications, I was really starting to feel stuck in limbo. Hopefully, with the Al-Ain interviews coming up soon too, we will finally be able to get things in motion!