Dear Paul, Jen, Izzy and Alex

Thank you very much for your very generous wedding gift of blackwater rafting. Having looked more closely at it, we are very sorry but not sure if we are going to do it. We hope you don't mind but we decided to spend the money on a jewelry making class here on Koh Phangan. As you may or not know, I had to send my wedding ring back because it was faulty and Donna has not brought any of hers with her out of safety so so far we have been travelling quite ringless. We thought therefore it would be a good idea to go and make our own wedding rings.

We thought this was quite appropriate for you as one of your children was my best man and the other one is into Lord of the Rings (so the whole forging of a ring thing).

Originally it was meant to be a one day course but due to neither of us having any talent at the subject, we ended up taking two days to complete our rings but now we have them we can say they were worth it; hard work but nothing rewarding is ever easy.

Donna had the vision of delicate and intricate designing and working. Oh no, this was lots of

Cutting metal with a hacksaw (Donna was better at this, not only being a lot quicker but broke considerably less blades that me)

Soldering bits of metal together (neither of us were any good; I was quicker but I also managed to give myself a serious blister from touching the boiling hot metal so score draw)

Filing (I was a lot better at this mainly due to Donna not liking the sound of the chisel on the metal so had to go and hide down the road)

Mangle wringing (Donna didn't try this so technically I was better but Yot (the lovely jewelry expert trying to teach us what to do) had to do most of it because it was very hard and I got too hot)

All that hard work to end up with a couple of lumps of metal which quite frankly you wouldn't give to your worst enemy as a christmas present.

Ahh but then for the moneyshot. We took the rings into another back room and applied the polish and suddenly all the crap all over the rings got washed away and suddenly we were left with two rings that looked amazing which we can now wear proudly.

They are both a bit chunky and could perhaps be described as what medieval kings would wear but polished silver engraved with 'Donna' and 'Jim' in Thai (we hope)

Mine has a black saphire and Donna's has an emerald embedded in between the names.

Finally we have lovely matching rings we can be proud of and can say that we (mostly) made

So thank you very much.

Love Jim and Donna