Night Stone Jewelry

While Virginia doesn’t have the most exciting rocks, we go looking for them anyway, and just pick up whatever looks nice. Mostly for our gardens, but on this trip we were hoping to get some Unakite.
Unfortunately, I totally forgot to really study pictures of slabs and rough online before going, so we only had basic memory to go on. We found some stuff that is definitely *not* Unakite, but took home anyway as it is my understanding that the location we went to also has some jasper. There are a *lot* of different kinds of jasper across the world, so I have no idea what we were even looking for. Just that it wasn’t going to be Ocean Jasper, as that is from Madagascar.
Pictures were taken dry and outside, but it was a little overcast. A couple of the closeup images have been enhanced using brightness/contrast in Photoshop to try and get a bit closer to the color in brighter light.

Have nearly completed the basic frame/legs for half of the workbench. Due to some wood warpage it needed a small shim on one of the back legs, but overall it is doing quite well. I can sit/stand on it, so that should say quite a bit.

Taking a break for dinner right now, and having eaten I decided to cut a rock. Now, this isn’t just any rock. It’s special. It is known as “Driveway Granite”. I’ve been seeing this stuff all over our neighborhood as they’ve been building homes, and have been wondering for some time how well it would cut. It’s solid enough that it doesn’t crumble, but it certainly isn’t anything spectacular.

So it’s been a little while since I posted, but I’ve good reason. I’ve not been making jewelry. Instead, I set out to remodel my work room so it is a brighter, cleaner, safer environment.

Before:

That is the first picture. I had torn out half the carpet in the room before doing anything else as a bit of a way to kick my butt into gear. After that I moved everything but my lapidary workbench out of the room and got busy tearing out carpet, painting, putting in vinyl tile and installing ventilation.

The room now looks like this:

Now I’m starting the next phase of the project. This is a bit more difficult. I’m going to build my own jewelers workbench. I’m no experienced designer, so it’s probably a bit of a monster, but if it works, it works.

Here is the first piece I have completed. This is first of four frame pieces.

also known as: I had scrap silver + I was bored = this..

We got out and shoveled the driveway.
There are some really interesting drift formations on parts of our roof as well (pics #4 and #9)
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Going to put up some pics here of the snow storm we are in right now. Is interesting to say the least. Pics will be via links, and are 1280 x 1024 in size, so might take a bit to download.

“View out the back”
“Snowploughs working(?)”
“View up the street”

Just a small abstract (about half an inch tall). Was not easy to make because of where I chose to solder it, but I am thinking of ways in which I can overcome that in the future, so will probably make more, just for fun.

She wanted one with a stone, so I set out to do just that.

closeup of the opal

Size 7.5. Fits my wife perfectly. This was an okay run for a first try I would think. It is becoming apparent that one thing I really need to work on is getting the right amount of solder when I’m making my joins, as I tend to end up with too little, which results in areas that show.
Still, she likes it.

Just an experiement to see if I could do it. It came out really well. I am happy with the results being that it’s my first one.