A Custom Sleeping Beauty Turquoise Ring—and a Fun Connection to Elvis Presley

Every once in a while a custom jewelry project comes along that is memorable for reasons beyond just the piece itself. This Sleeping Beauty turquoise inlay ring was one of those projects.

The custom ring was commissioned by Lowell Hays, a Memphis jeweler who has been making jewelry for decades and has a pretty incredible history—Lowell was one of Elvis Presley's jewelers.

For an Elvis fan, getting a chance to work with Lowell was a lot of fun. Even better was having the opportunity to hear some of his stories about Elvis and what it was like making jewelry for him. Lowell's association with Elvis dates back to Christmas Eve 1970. According to Graceland, Elvis called Lowell to help him with some last-minute Christmas shopping. Lowell met Elvis at the Memphian Theater in Memphis carrying a briefcase filled with jewelry. Elvis picked out pieces for friends and family, and that night began a relationship that led to Lowell becoming one of Elvis's trusted jewelers. Elvis would later call him when he needed jewelry and even invited Lowell to accompany him on tour—as long as Lowell brought along a case full of jewelry.

All these years later, Lowell is still making jewelry, which made collaborating with him on this custom project especially enjoyable.

A Project That Played to Both of Our Specialties

This particular ring wasn't for Lowell himself. It was a custom order for one of his customers.

Although Lowell has spent a lifetime making jewelry, stone inlay isn't really his expertise. But over 50 years of inlay experience has made it ours. So he commissioned us to build the ring and handle the turquoise inlay.

The customer wanted a substantial men's band: size 13½, 8mm wide, in sterling silver and inlaid all the way around with Sleeping Beauty turquoise. That last part is important. The turquoise doesn't stop somewhere on the underside of the finger. It makes a complete 360-degree trip around the ring. And that's where making a ring like this becomes a little more complicated than it might appear.

Custom Jewelry Starts With the Numbers

For a custom project like this, we first nail down the basic parameters with the customer: finger size, ring width, metal, stone choice, stone color and the overall look they're after. From that information, I can determine what will be involved and provide a price estimate.

Once everything is approved, those specifications go to my CAD designer. The ring is then built digitally in CAD—Computer Aided Design. This lets us establish very precise dimensions for the ring, including the width, thickness, inlay channel and other details before we ever start working in metal.

My CAD designer sends back a rendering so we can see what the finished ring should look like. That rendering can then be sent to the customer for approval. Once the design is approved, we move from the digital world into the physical one.

Creating the Sleeping Beauty Turquoise Ring

The CAD model is sent to a specialized 3D wax printer. A jewelry wax printer works much like other forms of 3D printing, except it produces an extremely detailed wax model specifically designed for investment casting. The printer builds the ring layer by layer from the CAD file until we have a physical wax version of the exact ring we designed on the computer. That wax becomes the pattern used to cast the ring.

The wax ring is attached to a wax sprue and surrounded by a plaster-like material called investment. Once the investment hardens, the flask is heated in a kiln. The wax melts and burns away, leaving behind an empty cavity in the exact shape of the ring. This is where the term lost-wax casting comes from—the original wax model is literally lost during the process. Molten sterling silver is then introduced into that cavity. Our casting service uses an expensive professional vacuum casting system, which uses vacuum to help the molten metal completely fill the mold and reproduce the fine details of the original CAD model.

Once everything cools, the investment is removed and we're left with a rough sterling silver casting.

It doesn't look anything like the finished ring yet. The sprue has to be removed, and then the casting goes through several stages of sanding, finishing and polishing until the silver has the clean, bright surface we're after. And only then does the inlay work really begin.

Twelve Pieces of Sleeping Beauty Turquoise—Cut One at a Time

Sleeping Beauty turquoise is known for its beautiful, clean blue color, which was exactly the look the customer wanted for this ring. I start by selecting the turquoise and cutting pieces from the rough material using a rock saw. Each piece then has to be ground on a diamond wheel and individually fit into the channel. This is where years of experience with precision inlay comes into play. Every section of turquoise is cut, ground, adjusted and fit by hand into the inlay channel. And because this ring is inlaid all the way around, all of those pieces need to flow together so that the finished inlay looks consistent around the entire circumference of the ring. This is also where something I probably complained about learning in school suddenly became useful. Math.

For anyone who ever thought, When am I actually going to use geometry in real life?—apparently the answer is when you're trying to put equal size sections of turquoise all the way around a size 13½ ring. I used the outside diameter of the ring to calculate its circumference. From there, I determined that 12 turquoise sections, each approximately 8mm long, would give the ring the look I wanted without making the individual pieces either too long or too short.

Then came the decidedly non-mathematical part: getting all 12 pieces to fit perfectly in the inlay channel. Each section was individually cut and ground on a diamond wheel until it fit the channel and butted nicely against the pieces on either side of it. With a continuous inlay like this, small errors can accumulate as you work your way around the ring, so maintaining consistent dimensions is important. The last piece has to meet the first piece and there's nowhere to hide the difference.

The Finished Ring

The result is the ring you see here: an 8mm-wide, size 13½ sterling silver band with 12 individually fit sections of inlaid Sleeping Beauty turquoise extending 360 degrees around the ring. It's a relatively simple design at first glance, and that's part of what I like about it. The clean blue Sleeping Beauty turquoise against the polished sterling silver doesn't need much else. But there's quite a bit of work hiding behind that simplicity—from measurements and CAD design to 3D printing, casting, finishing, stone cutting and finally fitting 12 matching pieces of turquoise by hand. And for me, this one will also always be the turquoise ring I got to make with Elvis's jeweler. It was a real pleasure working with Lowell Hays. Hearing some of his firsthand stories about Elvis while working together made an already interesting custom project that much more memorable. And I think it's pretty cool that Lowell is still making jewelry in his 80s.

Have an idea for a custom inlay jewelry project? We'd love to help turn it into something you can wear for a lifetime. Visit our Custom Jewelry page to learn more about our process and get started.