North of Ordinary

Sarah-Monique and Marty live and work outdoors in the Yukon, and the place has shaped them as the land tends to shape people who spend real time in it. They know the trails, the seasons, the names of the wildflowers, and when they bloom. When they got engaged, they wanted custom rings made from materials that carried the memories they had built there – not something from a glass case in a jewelry store, but something from the land itself. So Sarah-Monique sent us a small jar of sand she had carried down from a glacier on a hike they had done together a few years back, and Marty sent a feather he had found out in a field. Both of them knew what they wanted those rings to hold.

Sarah-Monique lifts most days and works with her hands, so durability mattered. The custom inlay rings needed to withstand a life spent outdoors in the north, where winters are long, and the cold is serious. But the care they put into choosing those materials said as much about them as anything else. You do not carry glacier sand down from a hike unless that hike meant something. You do not send a found feather across the country unless it did too.

The wildflower lupine petals came from the land around where they live. In the Yukon, lupine blooms purple-blue in open, sunlit ground from late May into July, a short window before the season closes back down. Sarah-Monique had originally wanted to harvest the petals herself in spring, but the timing did not work out. When a customer cannot source their own materials, we do the legwork. For flowers especially, that means hunting down pressed specimens from specialty sellers, checking local flower shops, and occasionally sending someone out to pick the real thing when we need to match a specific color or variety.

We found a seller whose lupine closely matched what grows in the southwestern Yukon, so we felt good about using it. The color held. The petals were the right shape. Her ring also carries a strip of glacier sand alongside the lupine, with a thin band of white gold dividing the two inlays. Marty's tungsten ring holds the owl feather in the wider inlay, with a narrower strip of the same glacier sand beside it. The sand in both rings came from the same hike, creating cohesion between the two designs. 

Working with dried flower petals is one of those things that looks more straightforward than it is. The petals are thin, shift easily, and the natural color can behave unpredictably once resin is applied over them. Some flowers turn translucent, some hold their color, and you do not always know which until you are already committed. Lupine tends to hold well, but alignment still matters. The petal has to sit flat and even in the groove, because any gap or curl reads clearly through the finished resin layer. We pressed the petals into place, tacked them down, and filled the groove. The glacier sand went into the narrower channel alongside it, sorted by hand, and set below the surface of the gold so the resin seals fully over it rather than leaving any exposed edge. Once the resin has cured, the whole ring gets sanded flush and polished.

Marty's ring is a tungsten band, 8mm wide, with flat edges. Tungsten is about as hard and durable a ring material as it gets, and it holds its polish well, which made it a natural fit for someone working outdoors in the north. The feather inlay sits in the wider groove, with the glacier sand in the narrower channel beside it.

Both rings share that strip of glacier sand, the same material from the same place, running through two different bands in two different metals. It is a small detail in the finished rings, but it is the thing that ties them together as a set. 

Sarah-Monique's ring is clean and bright. White gold, with a band of deep purple-blue lupine petals running alongside a narrow strip of grey-flecked sand, the two inlays separated by a seam of white gold. The materials read clearly against the metal. Marty's ring is the contrast: polished tungsten, dense and dark, with a wide band of owl feather showing its natural barb pattern through the resin, and the same narrow strip of glacier sand beside it. The two rings look different in the hand, but they clearly belong together.

If there is a place that has shaped who you are, a trail you keep going back to, a landscape you call home, something you picked up and held onto, we can help you build it into a ring. Start your custom order here.