Happy Valentine’s Day…meet my new love

I am so excited, I just had to share.  Last year when I went to Tucson for the annual Gem and Mineral show, I fell in love with druzy!  What is that you ask?  Take a look

These beauties are quartz (on left) and smithsonite.  Druzy has become very hot lately due in large part to its “organic” rough look.  Not long ago when a lapidary was cutting away on some rough and came across a pocket of crystals like this, they might have tossed it aside into a “flawed” category, because it was not seen as stable material for shaping into finished pieces.  Thank goodness times have changed!

So I returned from Tucson with a new bag of rocks, and a yet unknown problem…

I had no idea that I could not set these stones with my current skill set…

So there they sat for almost a year.  I had a busy year unrelated to jewelry, so my stones lay quietly waiting in my home studio. They had spent thousands of years waiting to be unearthed, what was one more year of waiting to see what would happen to them?

Last week I took them with me again to see my teacher and mentor, Robin Jordan.  We looked at how we could set them based on my fabricating knowledge, and quite frankly, it was going to be a job.  I won’t bore you with technicalities (assuming you’re not bored already), but I’ll be honest: I love learning new skills, but this didn’t excite me beyond the fact that I would be able to see these lovelies worn around someone’s neck.

But then, Robin looked at me over the rim of his glasses and said;

“Or we could doing something really wild”

Well, who wouldn’t have their curiosity piqued by that statement?

And so, I finally started to learn about the wonderful new world of wax casting!

Again, I won’t bore you with the technical process, but here is a glimpse at my first three silver casting pieces, still in progress

So now I am even more excited than I thought I could be about fabricating jewelry.  The rules of the game have changed, the sky is the limit with possibilities, and I am rejuvenated!