“Mill and lathe tooling” arrives!
I know… you’re wondering why I might be writing about “mill and lathe tooling” on Quentin’s blog!
To explain, you should know that on occasion I read over Wes’ shoulder when he’s checking his email. Not because I want to know everything he writes about to his friends, but because often we receive the same emails from friends and sometimes my computer is further away so it makes it easier to just read from his. He doesn’t seem to mind.
So when Wes started email communications with a jewelry designer back in January to commission the design and fabrication of a surprise ring for me that would commemorate the birth of Quentin, you can understand why “Quentin Ring Design for Laura” wouldn’t work for a subject line! And so, the subject line for their emails was always something related to shop equipment… something I wasn’t likely to notice or have interest in reading.
Today the “mill and lathe tooling” arrived and it’s beautiful! What an awesome and wonderful surprise and a beautiful way to remember the birth of our amazing little one.
Eva Martin is the jeweler that created the ring with Wes’ input. She has an amazing talent for taking personal stories and creating one of a kind pieces of jewelry that tell those stories. She happens to have created wedding rings for several of our friends (Felicity as well as John and Emily), and we’ve been big fans of her work since we first heard about her.
The ring that she and Wes designed for me contains several bits of symbolism. The red stones are spaced every fifth stone on the ring, representing Quentin’s name (the Latin translation for Quentin is “the fifth”). They are in the shape of triangles to represent his middle name, Pascal. Blaise Pascal famously described Pascal’s Triangle in his Traité du triangle arithmétique (“Treatise on the Arithmetical Triangle”) in 1653. And the purple and yellow “people” made by the circles in between each of the red Quentin stones are meant to represent Wes and me.
While the ring was originally meant to be finished before Quentin was born, things took a little longer partly because Eva was also pregnant and expecting her second child to arrive shortly before Quentin was born! That makes for a busy schedule… but she appears to be slightly super-human and still continues with her amazing work so soon after having a baby. And it was more fun this way because I got to participate in the final rounds of design!
Thank you Wes!