ON a stone like that, you are better off making at least the bezel portion of the setting, (the rest of the ring can be a commercial setting). Making it by hand is fairly easy, though tedious, since everything has to be measured and cut exactly. Another approach, if the stone is smallish...in the 5 or 6mm range, is to heat the stone moderately and press it into some low temp wax, let it cool, remove the stone, carve the wax and cast either a bezel or complete setting. If you want to be right on the mark you can have a computer model of the stone made and use that with a CAD modeling program to model and them cast the setting. Lots of ways to make a setting for this and they all work. Have you made sketches of your ideas? Want to share them?
I was thinking of doing a halo....or maybe the LOGR flower setting...or maybe a DanielM u-prong setting....ahh, so many choices. I'm not a sketch artist so I have no drawings to share
I will have to search PS for some of the ones you named!!
karee, my peridot is 9.45mm (across the flat sides), so it's quite close in size to your luscious garnet (we need pics, by the way!). I also have a 10.5mm apatite that I set in a simple, 4-prong basket pendant. I'll post pics of both, just to give you an idea.
You know, the apatite is one of my favorite pendants, and I'm always surprised by how much I do actually see it - in the mirror when washing hands, reflection in the car window, etc. Funny thing is, I was wearing it in the diamond district in NYC, and one of the vendors came out of his booth to ask me how the stone was set - he said from a distance, all he could see was the apatite, and it truly looked like it was floating. I also enjoy that it's a pendant, and I don't have to worry about knocking it against stuff.