(Image via Imagur where you can see the entire process of how this ring was made)

No, this is not the One Ring to Rule Them All. It’s the wedding ring of Reddit user laporkenstein. What’s so special about it? How about the fact that he made it himself from a meteorite.

The meteorite cost him about $200 online, and then he got started forging. No, there is no matching ring. The lady had already fallen in love with something else, and neither insisted their rings had to be an exact match.

According to laporkenstein, he and his wife are now happily married for three years with a small daughter.

May this ring – and the marriage it represents – never be unmade.

But this does raise a question I’m curious about: how do you all feel about mismatched wedding rings? Love? Hate? Don’t care? Tell me what you think.

For my part, I think rings are a truly individual choice. I’m very much down with either choice, so long as both parties are happy with it.

Kiddies, I hurt my dominant index finger last night in a bizarre restaurant accident. Typing is tough today.

And so instead of something profound, I leave you with this awesome Klimtesque wedding band by Alex Sepkus:

When it comes to choosing wedding rings, there are a lot of decisions to be made: what material, who will and won’t wear one, to sparkle or not to sparkle… and the list goes on.

But one groom took the question even further: he decided to make them himself.

David Curtis and Jessica Stonex fell in love while working with the homeless through their church. They’d known one another from childhood, but finding they shared values and priorities sealed the deal.

One of those values? Deliberate simplicity. So when they decided to marry, they didn’t want to go out and buy fancy gold rings or involve diamonds. But they did want rings to symbolize their union. What to do? David remembered a story he’d heard about a friends’ grandfather who hammered his wife’s wedding ring from a silver coin. David and Jessica knew they’d found their answer.

David set out to find real silver coins, which meant they had to be minted before 1964, the year alloys started being added. The pure silver would be more malleable and thus better for jewelry making by hand.

A Ben Franklin fifty cent piece was perfect for Jessica’s finger, and David found a silver dollar would suit his hand nicely.

Then came the painstaking work of hammering them out into rings.

“You can’t hit it too hard,” he said. “You have to be slow and steady, and make small taps. It’s kind of a metaphor for marriage.”

In the end, though, David and Jessica have a pair of unique rings that reflect not only their beliefs (the words ‘Liberty’ and ‘In God We Trust’ can be read inside the bands), but their unique bond as well.

As Jessica says:

“Every time I look at my ring, I think, ‘Man, my husband spent 20 hours making this ring to bless me with.’ ”

What more can you say after that?

I believe I’ve mentioned before that Mr Twistie is a musician. He’s also a tremendously talented recording engineer. I love to watch him work. One of the things I get a huge kick out of is seeing the wave forms different instruments and voices make as he records things.

Well, jeweler Sakurako Shimizu has taken this idea and run with it. Those rings above? Are Shimizu’s work. The design is the wave form of someone saying ‘I love you.’ The rings come in silver, platinum, or 18k yellow, white, or pink gold. If you request it specially, they can also be made in 14k yellow gold. Oh, and if you’d rather it say something other than I love you, yeah, you can get a different (short) word or phrase instead. Each piece is custom and uses the wave form of the person you choose.

I don’t know about you, but I think this is one of the most romantic ideas in jewelry I’ve seen in a very long time.

In fact, if I come into some money soon, I’d love to have one made for me of Mr. Twistie’s voice. I may not need a new wedding ring, but another symbol of his love is always welcome.

Wedding rings are precious, but they’re also small fiddly things it’s surprisingly easy to lose.

The couple shown above are Lena and Ola Pahlsson. One day in 1995, while Lena was in the midst of a marathon baking session for Christmas, she lost her ring.

The couple searched over and over. When they remodeled the kitchen several years later, they even looked under and behind appliances and under the floorboards. No luck.

Sixteen years after the ring disappeared, Lena was in the vegetable garden pulling up some delicious carrots, when one of them proved to have something surprising on it: her long-lost wedding ring!

This is just one of seven amazing stories of lost and found wedding and engagement rings in an article over at Neatorama. Go read them for a combination good laugh and glowy feeling of things coming right in the end. Oh, and to get a couple good ideas of what never to do with your wedding ring!

Ah, the classic wedding ring photo...

Oh my, Wedding Photography Week II is winding down. And that means getting down to the nitty gritty – wedding ring photography. Love it or hate it, it’s one of those things I suggest letting your wedding photographer take since it’s a five second process and you may end up liking them. That said, I found a great set of wedding ring photography tips in a wedding photography guide for brides and grooms written by wedding photographer Glen Johnson. Here’s a taste:

This is one of the most difficult shots to get for a wedding photographer. Most couples are not aware of the fact that they are blocking it either with their hand positions or with their bodies. To turn this moment into a great photo opportunity, all you need to remember is that as you are putting the ring on, position your fingers on the top and bottom instead of on the sides of the ring.

One more tip is to avoid extending your free hand out to grab your partner’s wrist so that you can push that ring on there better. If you feel it is necessary to do this, try putting your hand UNDER your partner’s hand and grabbing on from below. This approach prevents your wrist from blocking the shot. Practice this couple of times, and you will see that it is possible to put the rings on while keeping your ring visible from your guests’ view, and photo capture.

Do you plan on taking wedding ring photos? Would you be terribly disappointed if your ‘slipping the ring on his/her finger’ shots didn’t come out?

via Cristiano Ronaldo (WARNING: Many images NSFW… or the faint of heart about boobies and other ladybits)

So. I was watching Four Weddings the other night (Fridays, 10:00, 9:00 Central on TLC) and was quite intrigued with one couple: Rachel and Brad. They were actors who put together a rather gloriously OTT wedding. There were bagpipes and air horns at least one acrobat, and handfasting done with sparkly ribbons, and the groom vowing never to smoke another cigarette. In fact, Mr. Twistie and I both agreed it was one we wished we could have gone to… and when Mr. Twistie gets as enthusiastic about a wedding as to want to be there, well, you know it’s a party.

Anyway, one of the less than conventional decisions that Rachel and Brad made was to have their wedding rings tattooed on rather than going the more common route of buying metal bands. Fair enough. Not my thing, but then needles wig me out on an epic level. Mr. Twistie, too. We would happily live in a universe where needles never, ever, ever get inserted into human flesh. But it wasn’t our decision to make. It was Brad and Rachel’s decision, and they chose to have ink on their hands.

In the opening interview, Rachel talked about how much more practical this is because you can’t accidently lose your ring. After all, a marriage is supposed to last a lifetime. She called it ‘more functional.’

Okay. Of course I know a lot more couples who have gotten divorced than have lost their wedding rings, but I can see where she’s coming from and have no beef with her reasoning or her reasons. It’s her finger. She gets to determine whether it bears a ring, a tattoo, or nothing at all.

When I started getting it as a cool thing was during the ceremony. The happy couple was asked to explain their choice to their guests. So what did Brad say?

It’s a blood oath, and the only tattoo that will ever adorn my body.

Dayum! Now that’s the sound of a committed groom!

How could Rachel top that? One simple declarative sentence:

You’re in my flesh forever.

Will Rachel and Brad live happily ever after? Will they always be happy with their decision to opt for ink over gold? Those are questions I cannot answer. All I know is they’re going in expecting forever and refusing to be anyone but themselves.

And you know what? I think that gives them at least two and a half legs up on people who don’t enter marriage precisely that way.