Wedding Jewelry

"Before you leave the house, take one thing off." - Coco Chanel

I am not a big jewelry person at all.  It is sad too because I have so many lovely pieces of jewelry that get neglected.  I usually don't remember to accessorize when I am leaving for the day.  Then other times I just feel too flashy.

So when I was deciding on my wedding jewelry, I knew I wanted to look a little glam, but definitely not over the top.

Since my dress is pretty sparkle-tastic I opted for a fancy bracelet instead of a necklace.  Plus I think necklaces draw attention to my stumpy neck.

I did get some really great earrings that look pretty good on me, if I do say so myself.  If you have a round face like I do, picking some longing earrings can really help your face look slimmer.  There is a good article here about complimentary earrings for your face. 

Want to know the awesome news?  I totally got my wedding jewelry for $30 bucks.  Sweeeeet!

$25 at Macy's

$5 at Target

Just enough sparkle! 

My Wedding Band is here!

The jewelry, not the music :)

yay!

I am the sparkley-ist girl in sparkletown!

I am so very glad that I found the ring I wanted in a real jewelry store before getting it on amazon, as to not repeat earlier mistakes.  Aaron got an email from the jewelry place that his ring should be in sometime next week!  We are moving right along!

Wedding Band Buying!

Bling Bling, ya'll.

If you've been with us a bit, you may recall my post when I got a quote on some old gold I wanted to sell.  Well I got a recommendation from our friend Annie in Las Vegas to bring the gold when we came for the wedding because local jeweler MJ Christensen will double the value of your gold if you spend it in the store.  So that is just what we did.

After evaluation our gold to sell, the guy we were working with said it was worth $190, or we could get $380 on a gift card.  :\  Now I know gold is sold by market price, and the market had gone down slightly since I got said gold appraised in Houston, but $380 was the cash price I was quoted...  So I felt a little bit like I was being had by this pseudo deal, but the Houston cash was going to buy a ring anyway, so it seemed like $380 was the max anyone will give us for this gold, so we may as well go shopping!
Now I had looked at several online places when making our budget, because I have no idea how much these things cost?  Well at a real jewelry store, they are much much pricier.  I looked at what they had to offer, and unfortunatly Aaron and I were not prepaired to drop $2K+ on a wedding band for me.  They had a beautiful selection, and I did find the ring that looks the best with my engagement ring - so at that point the trip was worth it.

The mens wedding bands were about what I priced them for so Aaron tried them on.  He went with a basic 6mm polished white gold band with a comfort fit feature.  I learned that comfort fit just means it is rounded on the inside (sort of like one of those tubes that you float in, or a donut versus a nut (that you build/screw things together with)?) and more comfortable for people not used to wearing jewelry (single men.)  So we got his band, and it will be mailed to us shortly.  And bonus - since we are residents of Texas, and buying in Nevada, no sales tax! 

I must point out as well, that Aaron's hand looks very nice in a wedding band ;)

More Poor Internet Choices

I got my wedding band in from Amazon.com.  It is perfectly lovely and just as I thought it would be.

My apologies for the horrible photography

There is a problem though.  While this ring is gorgeous by itself, I don't think it goes very well with my engagement ring :(  The band is just so dainty looking and my engagement ring makes it look teeny.  It's like my engagement ring is Marilyn Monroe and my wedding band is Audrey Hepburn.    It is hard to tell by the pictures, but there you go.  

So thankfully I have a 30 day window to return it and get a refund.  I think the problem is that I just picked a band I thought was beautiful without concern for matching with my engagement ring.  Pave settings look better alone I think, or you at least need some on your engagement ring as well otherwise they don't look like they go together at all.  Much like wedding gowns, you probably should buy a ring in person and not online.  Darn you Internet, your convenience has fooled me again!  Back to the drawing board!

Wedding Bands, and being resourceful

Sometimes things don't go as planned, but that is okay...   Aaron has taught philosophy classes for the last 2 semesters at a small college in town, and as far as he knew, this semester would be no different.  Well it turns out that they don't need him this semester, so our budget became a little skewed in the wrong direction.  Luckily, his bride to be is resourceful in the finance department and a professional bargain shopper!  Well I don't know if anyone has been watching the market, but gold has been at it's highest level in a super long time - and the first rule of smart money moves is buy low and sell high.  All of these places in town have been advertising like crazy to come sell your gold for top dollar (it was even on the evening news), so I thought I'd check into it...

My Mom and I cleaned out our jewelry boxes and found the gold stuff that we weren't into anymore, and today after I got off work I headed down to Houston Gold Exchange.  

I must interject that my original thought was something more sentimental.  Well kind of.  I budgeted for rings when gold was reasonably priced back in November, and now rings everywhere seem to be much higher.  But anyway, I thought I could take these old pieces and have them melted down into two wedding bands (and turned into white gold somehow...) but the man at the shop said that doing that was not recommended unless it was something really special to you because when the gold is melted down then reshaped to something else it will become very porous (?) (with pores) and basically be a not as good quality of end product.  Especially for a ring that you intend to wear for the next 50+ years.

I don't know if that is exact science or not, but it is what this dude said, so it is something to google for later.  

I got my free appraisal and all this stuff pictured below is worth $380 bucks!

 The current market price for gold is $1785.80 an ounce.  And you have to figure that these places are here to earn money, so you won't get 100% of the value.  I read that most of these Houston jewelers in the business of buying gold pay 60-70%.  The news story I saw recommended getting a few estimates and such before you sell, and I agree.  There are a few under the radar places that you can send in your gold and they mail you the money and pay around 85-90% but you really need to do your homework on them.  I will say that I have heard nothing but horrible things about cash4gold.com which advertises nationwide that they will rip you off bigtime, so whatever you do, don't go there!  So far a top pick I have seen is www.midwestrefineries.com.  Another thing about sending it off is that they may start melting away before you give then a yay or nay on their offer, so don't send grandma's old wedding ring unless you are sure you don't want it anymore.  So there is your mini-lesson on selling gold, lol.

A funny thing happened though.  The afternoon right before I went to see Houston Gold Exchange, I was looking on www.amazon.com for pictures I could take in to show the type of band that I wanted to have made:

www.amazon.com

A simple pave diamond white gold band.  Well amazon was having a super blowout clearance summer sale on jewelry and this $700ish band was on sale for $150 bucks!  So I told Aaron that we should get it since it was such a bargain, and it has a 30 day window to return it if I don't like it (but I think it is really pretty and just what I wanted).  Win!  Now we just need to get a ring for Aaron, but he just wants a basic band, so it looks like we will come in under budget on the rings.  Awesome!

And Aaron has an interview tomorrow to be a tutor/teach an SAT prep class for highschoolers, so send him some good vibes :)