Rustic & Main's Guide to Designing a Custom Ring with Your Own Materials

When you include a meaningful item in your ring, you infuse a piece of your history, whether that’s fabric from your grandfather’s Navy uniform, gold from your mother’s wedding band, or sand from the beach where he proposed. That’s why we love creating custom rings with customer-provided materials. Because it doesn’t just tell an extraordinary story, it tells yours.

Whenever designing something custom, we highly recommend scheduling a free consultation with our team either virtually or in-person at our Huntersville location near Charlotte, NC. But we hope this blog post can help inspire and answer a few questions you may have at the beginning of your custom wedding band journey.

We’ll go over some examples of items we’ve worked with and instructions for a few materials like flowers, wood, and fabric.

Examples of Custom Ring Materials We’ve Worked With

Your materials tell your unique story. Over the years, we’ve crafted custom rings with countless types of sentimental items. Some materials fall into a “traditional category,” like wood, fabric, or stone, while others are unique, such as feathers or vinyl records.

Wood

Wood always adds a touch of rugged refinement to a ring design and imbues a sense of sturdiness and tranquility. We often find customers including a piece of wood in their wedding band to honor their roots or a memory that grounds them, like wood from a childhood home or cork from a glass of wine they shared the night she said yes.

Fabric

Fabric is another striking type of material to include in your custom ring. Very often, we find that when people choose to include fabric in their ring, it is strongly tied to identity, such as uniform fabric or tartan, or it honors a loved one, like a piece of your grandmother’s wedding dress or a ribbon from your father’s well-worn Bible.

Stones

Customer-provided stones hold reminders of accomplishments or mementos you picked up along life’s path. Often, they are literally connecting to a life “milestone” or transporting you to one of your favorite stops on memory lane. Life’s journey has its ups and downs, but something about seeing that granite you found on the first property you and your fiancée bought reminds you that you can do anything together. Seeing those river rocks takes you back to those cherished summer days when you and your best friend’s families would vacation together in the mountains.

Sea Treasures: Shells, Sand, Sea Glass, and More

Sea treasures like shells, sand, shark teeth, or even fishing line hold the reflections of yesterday’s adventures, allowing you to reminisce on memories made on beautiful sunset shores. These reminders of beauty and excitement warm our hearts on peaceful days and bolster our sails when our spirits are discouraged.

Metal

We’ve used a variety of customer-provided metals in our rings, but one of the most common is probably guitar strings. We love how this material infuses the ring with musicality and harmony, showcasing the role music plays in the wearer’s life.

We also work with accenting a piece with gold flakes or shavings often. This can come from anything from a pin, a wedding ring, or even an airplane, allowing your wedding band to gleam with a sparkle of your adventures.

In some cases, customers want to melt down an item and have something like a metal inlay crafted into their ring. If you are interested, feel free to reach out to us so we can guide you through that process.

Flowers

Flowers and leaves are a beautiful way to honor the journey of how you’ve grown as a person or celebrate a love that is ever in bloom. They can also serve as a symbol of Earth’s vibrant beauty or a reminder to seek out the unique loveliness that each day has to offer.

Other Unique Materials

Even if the item doesn’t fall into the categories above, we are still open to working with unique items you treasure. These materials often tell incredible stories, like bristles from the brushes a grandfather and granddaughter used to paint with or butterfly wings from a cherished heirloom collection.

We do have some limits to the materials we work with (listed near the bottom of this post), but for the most part, if there is an item that’s special to you, it would be our honor to craft it into a custom ring.

Customer-Provided Gems for Engagement Rings

We also work with customer-provided gems. If you’re interested in featuring your own gem in a custom engagement ring, you can let us know during the design process. If you would like further guidance, feel free to contact us.

Custom Ring Materials Process & Instructions

We will need any custom material sent to us so we can evaluate it before we start crafting your ring. This is to ensure we can make a ring of the quality you expect for your treasured items.

Where to Mail Your Materials

Download and fill out this materials form and mail your materials to:

11959 Ramah Church Rd.
Huntersville, NC 28078
ATTN: Materials

Custom Fabric

Amount Needed: at least 2x4 inches of fabric

Note: Fabric appears darker when inlaid in the ring. You can wet the material with water to get an idea of how it will look in your ring.

Custom Tartan

We work with custom fabric, but if your priority is to have a specific tartan pattern incorporated into your ring, we recommend the following method rather than sending us a piece of your own tartan fabric.

Since ring inlays are small, we’ve found tartan ribbon works best for showcasing the pattern. We have a specific type of ribbon that works well, which we offer in-house. We have a wide variety, but if you can’t find your specific tartan with us, you can likely find it at House of Tartan.

If you order from House of Tartan, you can ship it directly to us, and we will need about 10 inches of fabric to craft your ring.

Custom Wood

Amount Needed: 8x1x1 inches

Grain should run lengthwise.

Note: The outside of old wood and driftwood grays, while the inside can retain its natural color. We can accommodate your preference if you let us know which part of the wood you would like us to use.

Custom Guitar String

Required: Strings need to be 0.85” to 0.95” mm thick. Anything thinner or wider will not fit well in the ring inlay.

Preferred: Fresh guitar strings. We can craft with used guitar strings, but oil residue on the string may corrode the string over time, even though the string is sealed in epoxy.

Custom Sand, Stones, & Sea Shells

Amount Needed:

• Sand: about 2 tablespoons
• Stones: roughly a handful
• Shells: if the shells are about the size of a quarter, 6–8 shells

If there are different colors in the material you send and you have a specific preference, let us know, and we’ll do our best to highlight the color(s) you like.

Custom Flowers & Leaves

Amount Needed: small handful

Must Be Fully Dried: We can work with pressed or dried flowers in their natural states, but they do need to be dried.

Recommended Drying Process: Put flowers in a container and cover with silica gel (available at your nearest craft store or online). Depending on the flowers’ size, it will typically take 2–4 days. Petals dry faster.

Custom Coffee

Amount Needed: a handful of coffee beans or a couple of spoonfuls of coffee grounds

We prefer to work with coffee beans, but we can work with coffee grounds too.

Notes:

Coffee Grain: If beans are provided, we can control the grain and provide a good mix for the final ring. If grounds are provided, it’s important to note that the grain is more visible with coarsely ground coffee rather than fine coffee grounds.

Coffee Roast: Darker roasts look darker and have more of a black inlay look, while light and medium roasts have a more brown-to-reddish hue.

Materials We Do Not Work With

While it's our pleasure to craft a custom ring for you with your cherished items, there are a few select items we either aren’t able to or choose not to work with.

• Ivory (elk ivories OK since they aren’t actual ivory)
• Recreational drugs (example: cannabis)
• Diamonds (for inlay rings)
• Customer-provided elk antlers
• Ashes

We’re truly honored to work with your sentimental items and heirlooms, and our goal is to celebrate their specialness in a custom wedding band that you can cherish for a lifetime. If you’re interested in further guidance on designing a custom ring with your own materials, make sure to reach out to schedule a free virtual or in-person consultation.