Night Stone Jewelry

3 out of 5 isn’t bad (the other two crumbled when cutting them).

The spencer material I have is offcuts mostly, so it’s not the most stable, but the stuff that is stable comes out pretty nice. Two of these have some fire to them, one has a nice green broadflash. Of course the fire refuses to be photographed. :/

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.

I needed a break from working with wood, and since my lapidary side is set up now, I took to making some rocks.

0187CP12m. This one came out of a rock that was very difficult for me to cut when I originally got the rough that it came with. I decided to see what I could do with it and managed to pull some nice stuff out of it.

This one is TigerEye

And I also made a nice Jade and opal intarsia cabochon (11mm x 7mm x 4mm)

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.

The stones below are grey base Lambina opal. 3 of them are from the same piece of rough. All of them were cut from rough that a friend of mine, whom the collection is named for, gave me when I was just a newbie opal cutter.

The back of 0186L shows a little angling that I need to correct, but will do that by hand as it is delicate work.
0186L is 18mm x 13mm x 3mm, and 4.65c skin to skin fire, predominantly red and green. If this isn’t at least a 4 on the brightness scale, I would be shocked. I don’t photograph opals to well, and, as with some previous ones, this one refuses to photograph badly.

0183L

0184L

0185L

0186L

0186L_back

I’m not going to go through and list the various stones here except to say that all but one are Coober Pedy opals, the other is a Stone Canyon Jasper.

I had a bezel that didn’t work out size-wise for another stone, so I cut a piece of Stone Canyon Jasper to fit this one. I wasn’t sure what to do with it, but the filigree wire was what ended up happening.

The first of these is the largest cabochon I’ve ever cut, and is also the first I’ve cut with an inside curve to it. It is just over 2″ long. The second one is about 1.25″ long.

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

This was a rather nice doublet. Unfortunately I slipped while burnishing the bezel, and the end of it shattered.