Sapphires - Septembers Birthstone

Sapphire is the birthstone for the month of September, and they are associated with the 5th, 23rd, and the 45th wedding anniversaries. I know this won't mean much to you, but they are 9.0 on the Mohs scale of hardness, 1 step below diamonds, making them the second hardest natural mineral.

Once upon a time, sapphires were believed to have great healing powers that would help the wearer with rheumatism, colic and even mental illness. Sapphires have also been associated with great wealth and many Hollywood royalty have been seen sporting Sapphire jewelry.

Joan Crawford received a 70 carat star sapphire ring from her second husband. When Richard Burton proposed to Elizabeth Taylor for the second time, he too presented her with a cabochon sapphire ring.

Lady Diana Spenser's engagement ring from Prince Charles was an 18 carat, deep blue, oval sapphire surrounded by 14 round brilliant cut diamonds. This same ring, as many of already know, was presented to Kate Middleton, now known as Princess Katherine, from Prince William.

Medium to Dark Blue is the most associated color for this birthstone, but if you were lucky enough to be born in the month of September, you may pick from any color in the sapphire family for your jewelry. Your choices may include blue, yellow, pink, green, brown, purple, white, orange or colorless, and there is even a rare variety known as color-change sapphire that shows different colors under different lighting conditionsSapphires in any color are a versatile stone that may be set into most any type of jewelry for your enjoyment.

At Windy City Diamonds, we have custom manufactured many styles of jewelry that have incorporated Sapphires. Sapphires are beautiful on their own, but when accented with diamonds, the excitement intesifies with these precious stones.

Here is an example of a spectacular 5.00 carat, cushion cut sapphire diamond ring that we made for one of our clients.

Again surrounded by beautiful round brilliant cut diamonds, this made a breath taking diamond and sapphire engagement ring. This is one lucky lady!
Best of all, sapphires are easy to care for, requiring no special treatment for cleaning.

Sustainable Weddings

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending my Niece's wedding. My niece and her husband are extremely environmentally conscience, and they wanted to see how "green" friendly they could manage with their wedding, leaving as small a foot print as possible.

The first thing that they did was to use Vimeo to create an e-video for their save the date. Of course this was then disseminated to their friends and family via email, leaving no environmental footprint in their path, and they saved money as well. No paper, no printing, no postage.

Now comes the invitations. Again, turning to the internet, they produced a beautiful e-vite, along with a "response card" to maintain their goal of being completely sustainable in their approach. The invitations were beautiful, and I've found that there are a multitude of sites on the web that may be used for sending out these invitations via email, some free, some for a small fee, but this too saves on paper and postage, leaving no footprint.

I wondered how they were going to maintain this lofty goal of zero impact on the environment with their actual wedding, which did turn out to be a bit harder, but still, I was amazed at the extent to which they worked this out.

The arrived and left their wedding on bicycle, no pollution, no impact.
The wedding dress was made in a fashion that it could later be dyed and hemmed to wear in the future. This has a small impact on the environment, but no more than any other clothing that you would purchase normally.

The food that was served was all vegetarian, and delicious, but this didn't impress me as being sustainable, until I found out that all of the produce was grown locally, only organic produce, much of it by the chef him self, and used in preparation of all of the meals. No shipping, cartage, etc, no fuel used to transport, just good quality, organic (no pesticide) vegetables. They even served fruit smoothies made with locally grown organic apples. What a wonderful idea!!

The Flowers were all locally grown, in season flowers, which were beautiful, and again kept the environment footprint very small. In addition to this, the vases that were used were ball jars that will be re-used again and again as my niece loves to make canned fruits and vegetables.

Ok, so I guess you’re wondering how we can bring the jewelry into the idea of sustainability. Easy, the rings that were used were family heirlooms, re-worked to fit their taste!!

All in all, this was quite an impressive wedding and quite an impressive feat to accomplish such a small environmental footprint with 150 people at the wedding!