giveaway winnings

I won a giveaway over at Amy's blog a few weeks ago.  I won a gift certificate for Amber's shop (kellen813).  Amber makes a lot of hand stamped, personalized jewelry, most of which is much more than the the gift certificate amount.  Aside from my wedding ring, which is engraved (on the inside), I really don't wear anything personalized and wasn't looking to spend a lot of money to get a gift for someone else.  So I chose one of her wire wrapped rings in blue and asked if I could have it and another one (I wasn't too picky about the color) in a smaller size.

I know that most of her work is made to order or requires extra time because of the personalization.  I didn't expect my pieces to be her top priority.  But the whole process was pretty slow, and her communication wasn't great.  She said that she'd send me a picture of some of the other stones she had...but didn't.  She finally told me that the rings were ready and that the second one would be olive green (still no picture).  It took over a week after that for them to arrive.  Again, I know that I wasn't paying for these, but if it were me as the seller, I would still give top notch service in hopes of gaining a new customer.

The wire wrapping is okay.  I wouldn't have requested the rings if the wrapping in her pictures weren't pretty decent, so I was a little surprised by this.  I am not crazy about doing wire wrapping, but I've done enough of it now to know that I could at least as good of a job as she did if not better.  If I had paid someone else to do this job, I would have been a little upset.  The green isn't as nice of a piece of stone as the blue, but I do like the color.  You can also tell that the two rings are not the same size.  The green one fits pretty well on a few different fingers, but the blue one is loose on every finger except my right thumb, which just looks odd.  This would be okay if the stones weren't as weighty, but the stone makes the ring lean if it doesn't fit snugly.

I knew that these rings would be bulky and thus not pieces that I'd wear on a daily basis, which is okay.  I have a couple dresses/dressy outfits that I can wear with the green ring.  Honestly I will probably end up giving the blue one away at some point.

Her hand stamped jewelry may still be of a good quality.  She's had a decent number of sales and has good feedback so I would imagine that it is.  But I would look elsewhere for wire wrapped rings.