Rebecca Zemans Jewelry Blog — custom engagement rings

It is such a tremendous honor to be recognized by someone as awesome as Martha Stewart!  I am over the moon to be named as a finalist in the American Made Awards with over one thousand votes for the Audience Choice Award!  Voting is open and I am so grateful for the support from near and far. This recognition is especially meaningful because I like to think of myself as a local goldsmith with global reach. America is built on small businesses that connect with their customers on a personal level.  Big jewelry stores can be intimidating, and I prefer...

Today is the first day of Autumn and even though we'll miss the sunny fun of summertime, we are looking forward to the striking palette that is bestowed upon us in the coming months.  Over the years we've worked with couples who have used colored stones in their engagement rings, embracing this colorful time all year long!  Inspired by these couples, we've created this roundup of some of our favorite alternative engagement rings! Colored gemstones are selected for their birthstone attributes, their historic and cultural meanings and their unique beauty.  Any stone can be set in an engagement ring, or...

Welcome to our ongoing series exploring the different types of metals we work with!  Palladium is a metal we are seeing more requests for in additional to traditional metals, so we wanted to educate our customers about some of the great characteristics of palladium.  Palladium is a silvery-white metal with similar properties to platinum, however it is the least dense of the platinum group metals, making it a more affordable metal option than platinum.  It is named after the Pallas asteroid which was discovered around the same time as the metal, at the turn of the 19th century.  Over half...

Mike Stephen, host of Outside the Loop, a WGN 720am radio show that airs on Saturdays at 6am came to visit the studio a few weeks ago to talk about what I do. It was so much fun to have him record the sounds of the studio and chat about my process and inspiration. Click here to have a listen. You'll find me at the 8-minute mark. Enjoy!    

We have been doing a lot of custom wedding bands and engagement rings lately, so we decided to do a little blog post about the different stone settings we use for those of you who are interested in a custom design that includes stones. In the end, which setting you choose to use in your design mostly depends on which one you like the most. However, there are advantages and disadvantages to each setting, that should also be taken into account.   Flush setting A flush setting is when we cut a hole into the band, just big enough to...