Jewelry craze!!

Some of you know that I have a fantastic group of girlfriends that I met online. Many of us met long ago while planning our weddings on theknot.com and then we've met others throughout the years through thenest.com. Things got crazy on the nest, so we formed our own private message board and have formed some great friendships! I acutally got to meet many of them last winter in New Orleans! We had a blast! One of the girls is named Diana and she's in the National Guard serving in Afghanastan right now. Diana is a true southern belle from TN with a fierce eye for fashion and style and it always amazes me that she can be such a hard ass and serve in the military! There's not much to do over there, so Diana has befriended a jewler named "Nick" and he is seriously hooking us up with jewelry!! He's also making some custom suits for some of the husbands for about $75 a piece! I am getting three rings - blue topaz, black onyx and deep purple amethyst (for less than $200 for ALL THREE). All three stones' weight combined is well over 10 carats...we told her we wanted "honkin huge" stones! The topaz was $8 a carat, onyx was $4 a carat, and I got the highest quality amethyst for $4 a carat instead of $6 because the stone I am getting had a microscopic nick which he was able to scratch out!

Here's a picture of my topaz stone on the left - it's 4.25 carats and will be set in a simple prong tiffany style setting:



This is a picture of Diana's Onyx ring, and I'm getting one almost just like this but with a square stone:


And this is a ring from Tiffany & Co but my amethyst ring should look similar to this - emerald cut, dark purple, same setting:


And for good measure, here's a pic of us at our first get together this January in NOLA. Natalie and her husband live there and graciously hosted all of us, we had a blast!