Night Stone Jewelry

Just a couple more 3.5mm rounds

Some bright little 4mm opals.

Just 3 I made today (so far). Smallest is 4mm in diameter.

The opals I’m considering putting into the Barrette are 3.5mm in diameter. I *had* to know for myself what it was like to cut something that small, so here we go.

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Well, it is officially a wearable barrette now. I haven’t done the strength testing on the hair clip piece, but the epoxy has it on there pretty darn good, which is great.
The final step will be to add the opals to it, but they are en-route from Australia as I type and won’t be here for several days probably. This will give me time to practice cutting the holes for the inlay as well, which I need to do.

So I got this wild idea in my head some time ago to make barettes out of Black Jade. Durable, tough, and able to withstand a drop onto a tile floor (for the most part) without major damage.

Then I thought “hey, Let’s inlay some opal into it!”

While this was a fantastic idea, opal is quite fragile, and kinda killed the purpose of the Jade being tough. In addition, trying to get Jade cut and such is a pain.
So I settled for black Obsidian. A friend through a forum I’m part of sold me some “blanks” of black obsidian, cut to size, and after receiving them today I decided to see if my idea had any merit.
Here are the results:

Now, I could nitpick on some stuff, but I’m not going to. It came out fantastic. It has the proper curve to accept the barette metal piece, and the polish came out 95% good.

The next phase will be to see how well jewelers epoxy sticks the metal to the Obsidian. If it doesn’t work out well enough, I’m going to then have to drill tiny holes through the obsidian to insert pins that will hold the barette piece in place (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, go to the store, look at some barettes (preferably not plastic). If they have metal in the body, they generally will have these pins bent over and holding the clasp in place.
I’m hoping the epoxy will be enough.

Anyway after that is done, I get the dremel out and see about inlaying some opal into it, which should pretty it right up.

I’ve gone through a bit of Coober Pedy opal now, and have to say that of the various stuff I’ve purchased over the past year, the most disappointing by far has been 23mile material. I had a full ounce of it and out of that full ounce I got one tiny little stone (posted on this blog under 0150CP23m). The material had plenty of color bars, but none of them faced up at all. Given, this was lower cost material. About $25/oz. Still, what I’ve received in that category from 12mile field, for example, has been much better.

Just goes to show how different various areas are in the mining fields.

11mm x 8mm x 4mm 2.35c
This opal has some inclusions on the side that are more blemishes than anything. It’s also not real bright. About a 1.5 on a 1 to 5 scale as is used by many opal cutters/sellers. It does best in bright light, and shows better than in the picture in those circumstances.

This little opal is a classic example of cutting a dome on a fire line that is too thin to be domed. I did my best to keep it flat, but the stone is only 9mm x 7mm x 3.5mm in size, and I still managed to get some curve to the edges.
The flash on this is just great, especially in brighter lighting. In the sunlight it will be a stunner. The broad flash pattern is a bit directional, however this would make a great ring stone.