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Lapidary comes to my workshop

Posted April 1, 2015 

So I’m super excited about a new turn in my jewelry making. I’ve aquired some rock cutting equipment and am learning lapidary skills. I’ve always used regional turquoise from Nevada, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico and have been wanting to increase my regional offerings so last year I introduced jade sourced from Wyoming. To get hyper-local I figured I would be interesting to start cutting some of the stones I find while hiking here in my own county, Sublette County.

jasper chert fossilized algae quartz agate wyoming

Sublette County is a huge piece of land and mostly public land. It’s amazingly beautiful and varied in geography. We have high sage-brush desert in the southern half of the county and large granite mountains in the north. A lot of the land was carved by glaciers during the ice age so there are large boulders and glacial moraines at the base of the high peaks of the Wind River Range. The desert used to be a vast ocean and is part of the Green River Formation. People find all sorts of cool fossils in Wyoming and Sublette County and south is no exception. If you go a little farther south from Sublette County you get to Kemmerer, Wyoming, a small town known for the Green River fossils, millions of little fish fossils (below is a photo of one I have in my kitchen) as well as palm fronds, prehistoric crocodiles and birds.

kemmerer wyoming green river formation fish fossil

The jade in Wyoming is found in the center of the state near Lander and Casper and it varies in greens to pitch black that shines up like a mirror. I love the jade found here and this is especially one of the reasons I am beginning my lapidary journey; I want to cut unusual shapes for my jewelry. Besides jade we have quite a bit of interesting agate and jasper of varying patterns and colors. So now that the snow is melting I can go rockhounding with pals, what a good time.

(fossilized algae with the corner polished up)

By the way…an interesting thing about the word ‘lapidary’… it comes from the Latin word for rock: ‘lapis’. You hear ‘lapis’ used for Lapis Lazuli is a popular blue stone, often found in Afghanistan, and that name simply means Stone Blue (lazuli coming from the word ‘azure’).

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Free Form and Architectural Jewelry

Posted March 11, 2015 

In the last few weeks I have been working on some special wax carving projects. I usually fabricate most of my jewelry from sheet, wire and various metal stock but sometimes a project calls for unusual curves or shapes so I carve a wax model to be cast in silver or gold.

I just carved a setting for the pear shaped citrine pictured above. This stone is a large gem and I wanted to have some interesting cut-away areas to allow for light to pass through the setting and brighten the stone. Faceted stones need a “seat” to sit on inside of a setting, you can see that I carved out a step down for the stone to be able to sit evenly all around. I will be adding a bail to the top of the drop so that this can be worn as a pendant.

Another project I am working on is developing a fun line of stacking rings in various textures. I’m enjoying working with geometric and repeating patterns. I will be offering these in both silver and gold in a range of sizes.

And pictured above is a one-of-a-kind wax carving for a large flat stone. My customer desires a signet style ring and I will be adding Masonic symbols that he has chosen as well as carving words on the inside of the band.

Carving waxes taps into a free-form sculptural style. Fabrication with metal is also sculptural but more architectural in its approach, building blocks put together with connecting angles.

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Deep Dark Winter

Posted January 6, 2015 

Wyoming winter aspen trees.

Wyoming is a great place to experience a true winter and the end of December through the beginning of January always proves to be a deep dark and extremely cold time. Last week we had a spell of 20 below zero weather. But already I can tell the days are just getting a wee bit longer; it’s been two weeks since the solstice.

After Christmas, I took the week off of work to enjoy the bottom of the year merging to the beginning of a new year. Usually my husband and I travel to visit family for the holidays but this year we stayed put and I was able to have some quality lying-on-the-couch time mixed with daily cross country skiing and plenty of festivities in between. There is a very large lake just outside of Pinedale, Fremont Lake, and we skied along its banks a few of those days. We witnessed it freezing over. At first there was ice gathering along the shore and a wind was keeping it chopped up but then, just a mere three days later, the entire lake had a sheet of ice covering the surface. Soon enough it’ll be thick enough to ski on but I’m not trying it yet.

I’ve returned to my shop and studio to dig into work once again and I hope to realize some of the many designs I have in my head and catch up on last year’s paperwork. It’s a nice time of year during this dead of winter, the short days make for longer star gazing and the cold weather makes for more coziness inside.

fremont lake pinedale wyoming on the verge of freezing over
Fremont Lake Pinedale Wyoming beginning to ice up, december.
Fremont Lake, Sandy Beach, Pinedale Wyoming, December

Fremont Lake, Pinedale, Wyoming, on the verge of freezing over, late December.

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Two Into One: melting two rings together to make a new one.

Posted December 5, 2014 

I recently had the opportunity to make a wedding ring for a customer who wanted to combine a ring from her family and the groom’s family. She wanted to have them melted together to become one ring for her fiance. The two gold rings were her mother’s diamond engagement ring and his father’s wedding ring.

First I cut off the diamond cluster setting (and later reused that for her necklace) and put both rings into a crucible and melted them together.

Once they were a molten ball of gold, I carefully poured them into an ingot mold. The gold ingot cooled quickly in the mold because the thick cast iron of the mold pulls the heat out. I further quenched the ingot and cleaned it.

After it was clean, I began to roll it out in my rolling mill tool. I cranked the ingot through the rolling mill many times until it was about 1.5mm thick.

Once it was an even strip, I trimmed the ends to be flush right angles and began to bend the strip so the ends would meet. It always takes adjusting and filing to get the ends to meet perfectly across the entire length of the seam. Once they were lined up just right I soldered the seam with my torch and cleaned the ring.

Once I’ve joined the seam I slide the ring onto a ring mandrel and hammer it with a rawhide hammer until it is round. Then it is filed, sanded and polished to a smooth high polish finish.

With the diamond cluster, my customer wanted to repurpose that to become her necklace. I connected it to a long 14K gold chain that she will wear on her wedding day.

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Wyoming Jade

November is here and I’m starting to ramp up for the holiday season which means building up my inventory in the shop. I’ve been using some beautiful Wyoming sourced jade. In the center of the state there is a nephrite jade deposit and the colors range from an apple green to black with all shades of green in between. One of the unique specimans to Wyoming is the “snowflake” green which has little white crystals mixed into the green. The rock hounds find it in the center of the state, in the sagebrush desert between Lander and Casper; it is usually above ground so they walk all over with their eyes glued to the ground looking for the rocks and hoping for the big million dollar boulder. A lot of people are unaware that gemstone quality jade is found in Wyoming.

I bought some Wyoming jade from a local guy this past summer and have begun using it in my jewelry. And since jade is the toughest gemstone available, it makes for a great jewelry stone and can be worn with confidence in rings.

(This is my husband looking over the rough although we bought all cut stones. We hope to learn the art of lapidary someday.)

Some of the stones show a whole different color when they are held up to a light, for example the pendant below shows a mossy medium green when held up to a light and is a forest green when held against my hand.

The pendants above show the variety of greens found in Wyoming jade, from an apple green to a dark forest green and even a grey-green.

I am super excited to have a localy sourced gemstone available for everyone and will be offerening more designs as quickly as I can get them made and uploaded to the website.