A couple came to us with an unusual material that they wanted incorporated into their wedding bands; a material that looked like chunks of fist-sized dense green glass. They found these while walking outside an industrial complex in Portugal. Although they didn’t know what the material was, it held a great deal of meaning for them. Some research and consulting with industrial metal workers revealed that the material was silicon carbide (slag). It is rare to find it naturally-occuring, but is fairly common in Spain. It is more often found as a by-product of iron smelting. Because slag has a very high melting point and is extremely difficult to cut, our challenge was to figure out how to incorporate this substance into a set of rings. After several design trials, we were able to set the slag deep within the rings.
