Rings have been made. Now I just need to solder the braided part around the flat band, solder the two bands together, create a bezel for the stone and set the stone.
This is what the band will look like once I solder the braid on the flat band. I'm doing two bands like this and the stone will sit between them. Not sure why I did such a complicated design, but it will be cool once it's done.
We had our first New York Thanksgiving this year. It was also the first time we hosted it at our house. It all started with an excellent young turkey from Bell & Evans. You might have heard of Bell & Evans as they are the people who provide the turkey for the president every year. Not the one that gets pardoned, the real one. You can't really tell from the picture, but this guy was somewhere between 18 and 20 pounds. I had to bring him home from the butcher in our little shopping cart because he was too heavy to carry.
We brined the turkey in a salt water bath for about 12 hours. It was kind of gross because the water turned all pink and bloody. 
After we put the turkey in the oven we had this yummy cheese plate.
Doesn't this look perfect? It kind of reminded me of that movie Delicatessen though. 
Here is some of the other great food we had. In the front are samosas that anshuman made by hand. I also see the marshmallow yams Ellie made and the mashed potatoes, roasted carrots and green beans that Jason made at our house. Cranberries on the side. There were cheesy potatoes that Susie made not shown in this pic and gluten-free stuffing that I made. Oh and you can't forget the gluten-free pumpkin pie and berry pie we had after a long walk around the neighborhood. 
My gold class ended and I took a little hiatus while traveling here and there. Now I'm back and even more excited to finish. I finally made wire and now have two bands. Progress is quicker now and I should be done within the next few weeks. Then it will be time for moons and lockets...
After six hours, this is what my gold now looks like. The end goal is 3 mm wire. I remelted it into a hot dog shape and then put it through the roller about a million times. I can only roll it about five times before I have to anneal it. Annealing involves heating it up until it almost melts and then putting it in the pickle (a liquid bath) to get rid of the "dirt" that gets on it from annealing. It keeps starting to crack along the top (you can kind of see this in the picture) and I've had to slightly remelt it once already to fix this. When you remelt it, you kind of have to start all over again. I'm trying to be patient.
Can you believe it's so small? I created this alloy last week by combining 24 karat gold with a tiny bit of silver and copper. You pick the color you want your gold to look like and then use a handy chart to figure out how much silver/copper to add to get that color. I went for Very Deep Yellow, 18 karat, which should be a bit darker than the usual color you see.
Yesterday I went to R Gems in the city to pick out a stone for the ring. I've always loved rocks and gems (even had a rock tumbler as a kid) so I could have spent hours looking at all of their stones. I ended up with a garnet (my birthstone) and a green quartz. I think I'll probably go with the garnet for this ring. They were super nice and even gave Scott and me a tour of the back where they cut the stones. The guy was saying that they use a diamond blade to cut the stones and this type of blade won't hurt your finger if you touch it. He fired it up to show us and pressed his finger against it firmly and sure enough nothing happened. Then he took a rock to it and it cut right through. I'm a little confused about how exactly that happened.
