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Yeah, I know it’s been far too long since I posted anything with substance. I’ll do my best to get something out this week. For now, here’s something I was playing with — with positive results for a change!
3.13ct CZ in my Retro-hex design. It’s hardly a novel design in the cutting world, but I can lay some claim here as I did this one from scratch. I’m waiting for my machine to come back from the shop so I can try some other ideas I’ve had a few weeks to ponder.
For the record, the image above is hosted by Flickr. Flickr makes things rather easy and gives double-exposure (which may come in handy if I ever go back in to business). Feel free to click the image and poke around my other pics.
| #13, Dark Green CZX | ||
|---|---|---|
| design | Light House (Jeff Graham) | |
| weight | 2.43ct | |
| dim. | 6.9×6.9×4.0mm | |
| date | 1/10/2007 | |
CZX is the trade name for blue and green cubic zirconia. This particular color looked promising when I bought the lot, but an earlier stone proved that it cuts out pretty dark. Since near-black stones, don’t have much appeal for me I have been looking for ways to lighten up the look of this material. Stone #13 represents an experiment based on some advise I was given by a professional faceter.
The sum of the advise was to minimize how much internal reflection the stone had. So I chose a simple design and made the pavilion angles as close to the critical angle of CZ as reasonable. Jeff Graham’s Light House has a very simple pavilion (check out the design schema), so it was a great starting point. All I had to do from there was reduce the pavilion angles. The stone turned out fairly thin, but not dangerously so; it’s still setable.
The technique did work somewhat — this stone has more green to it than my first attempt with this dark green CZ. It also has a very slight bit of dispersion when you rock the stone back and forth. It is still not what I had in mind. Guess I’ll have to keep experiementing with this stuff — it’s good practice cutting anyway.
| #14, Amethyst | ||
|---|---|---|
| design | Gram Easy Emerald (Jeff Graham) | |
| weight | 2.33ct | |
| dim. | 9.92×5.70×5.66mm | |
| date | 1/11/2007 | |
This stone was also something of an experiment for me. It is my first emerald cut (that was experiment enough) and it was my first use of a preform. By “preform” I mean piece of rough that popped off of someone else’s dop — they were so aggravated, they handed the rough to me “for practice”.
The picture you see here is somewhat ironic because you’ll note the window in the top-middle of the stone. That window is caused by the camera angle — you won’t see it head on…. but what you will see is a dark center where the light cancels itself out. The crown is too high; if this stone were round, I’d call it a nail-head. You can see the cancellation effect in the far left bezel facets.
Despite the dark center, I’m pretty happy with this one. The color is even and has a velvety quality (it looks far too washed out in the picture here). Maybe I’ll recut this stone someday.
It has become something of a tradition for us to go rock hunting on Thanksgiving day. This year we managed to sneak out a few days before Thanksgiving because that’s when Grandma volunteered to watch the kids.
Since we were in Delaware, we decided to take a little car ride and visit Cape May, NJ. Cape May is the southern-most part of New Jersey. It’s a pretty town and we enjoyed wandering the near-vacant streets of the tourist district. We especially enjoyed eating at the locally-famous Lobster House near the edge of town. It’s a pricey restaurant, but there is a diner portion that the locals frequent (same food, somewhat smaller portions and much smaller prices). I’m not sure I would like to be in the town or the restaurant during the “on” season when the town is packed with tourists.
A little online research told me that the place to find Cape May diamonds is on Sunset Beach. The signs for it are not very good, so a local map was helpful. Fortunately, these are freely available at the Ferry station.
Sunset Beach has two claims to fame. The abundant Cape May quartz and the wreckage of a WWI concrete boat just off shore. The wreck of the Atlantis and it’s place in naval history is pretty well documented online, so I’ll leave you to Google that for yourself. One website I read suggested that the wreckage was responsible for redirecting the “diamonds” to shore on Sunset beach.
The day we visited the beach, it was cold and blustery. We were eager to hunt “diamonds”, so we braved the wind hit the beach. Fortunately, we didn’t wait — when we left Cape May the next day, it was about 35 degrees and driving rain!
The beach is a combination of sand and pebble. The great majority of the quartz is pretty typical for the northeast, mostly opaque to translucent white pebbles. Mixed in are orange and occasionally purple pebbles of quartz, but these are always opaque. The colorless “diamonds” are hard to miss once you see them, they have a high translucency when they’re wet. The crystal quartz gives them a distinct sheen or glow, even in the gray diffused light we had that day. The “diamonds” are abundant enough that we took to high-grading pretty quickly after we started finding them.
Sunset Beach would be a great place for kids who are into rocks. The “diamonds” are just hard enough to find that you have to look for them, but abundant enough that everyone will find some. We came home with a healthy zip-lock bag full — though some were not “diamonds,” but pretty rocks to add to our kids’ collection. When our little guys are old enough, we’ll certainly head back to Cape May and let them collect some.
The largest “diamond” we found was an elongated tear-drop shape measuring 28×15x9mm (not pictured). It would have been a wonderful piece to facet except for the large white feathers and healed fractures. Unfortunately, the great majority of the colorless quartz pebbles you’ll find have such inclusions; pretty much what you’d associate with low grade colorless quartz from the Northeast.
The best stones we found are the four pictures here. As you can see, none of them are large. All of these are internally perfect and will likely cut flawless stones. The best of the lot is the triangular shaped one, measuring 9×9x5mm. I doubt anyone but a hobbist would cut quartz this size (though someone is cutting it: the souvenir shops advertise “Cape May Diamond jewelry”). I’ll likely cut one just for the sake of having a cut piece to put in my display with the rough.
I could not find information online regarding how large Cape May “diamonds” form. But after having hunted the beach, I would be very surprised if the facet-grade ones come any larger than the ones we found. Still, the souvenir shops were mostly closed during our visit, so I didn’t get to view any of the commercial jewelry they offer to know how large their finished stones were. (We did visit some of the estate jewelry shops in town, none of which had Cape May “diamond” jewelry.)
If you’re looking for facet rough that you can find on your own in the Northeast, I’d head to Herkimer. If you’re looking for a fun day on the beach with some easy rockhounding, Cape May is perfect.
| #10, Synthetic Color-Change Sapphire | ||
|---|---|---|
| design | A Round Cushion (USFG) | |
| weight | 8.52ct | |
| dim. | 12.06×12.05×8.02mm | |
| date | 11/1/2006 | |
Last night I finished stone #10, a color change synthetic sapphire cut into a cushion shape. I’m quite pleased with how the stone looks — which is great because I intended it for a show & tell stone while we visit family this month. But that is not to say I’m satisfied with it. I can’t bear to put the thing under a loupe right now — there are just too many mistakes for the amount of time I put into it. I keep reminding myself this is stone #10, not #100.
Here are three shots of the stone. The largest picture of the stone is probably how you would see it in person. The picture was taken under mixed lighting in our kitchen. The dark reddish purple color is how the stone looks under incandescent lighting, while the medium blue (my favorite) is under fluorescent lighting. The stone is clean, but I wasn’t very careful with my photography so you can see some fingerprints and dust on it. The wavy look in some of the facets at the top of the stone is a reflection from the cork it’s sitting on. (There are some tiny polish lines, but you need 10x magnification to see them.)
I joking call this material “Grandma’s Alexandrite.” It seems that whenever I’m handed a largish gemstone with the a story starting “This Alexandrite came from my Grandmother…”, the gem material is synthetic color-change sapphire. Synthetic sapphire has been around since late 1800’s, color change material from the early 1900’s. Natural Alexandrites are rare; large ones are extremely rare; large Alexandrites that are completely free from inclusions are practically unknown. The upshot is some poor gemologist or jeweler is left trying to explain to someone as gently as possible that their Grandmother’s stone is man-made and quite common. Fortunately, synthetic sapphire is beautiful in it’s own right.
| #4, Hudson River Glass | ||
|---|---|---|
| design | Easy Cushion (Jeff Graham) | |
| weight | 1.81ct | |
| dim. | 8.00×8.00×5.73mm | |
| date | 6/18/2006 | |
“Hudson River Glass” is the name I’ve given to facetable bottle glass you can find along the banks of the Hudson River in New York. This stone came from a very worn piece of antique blue glass — likely an apothocary or cosmetic jar. Bottle glass is fun to facet because it takes a polish nicely and really isn’t difficult to work with. The down-side is that the material is soft, so it has to be handled gently. I learned this fact the hard way — this stone has a chip on it’s girdle from my fumbling in trying to remove it from the dop.
Occasionally I get the chance to stretch my web devel legs. It doesn’t happen much (though I’m trying to find more time for it), but it does happen. I just formally announce the redesign of the Midwest Faceters Guild website.
The MWFG is a great non-profit organization. Everyone I’ve met so far has at least been extremely friendly (especially Tyler Miller), most have been willing to share as much faceting information as I could handle (and then some). If you want to get into grinding pretty rocks, but sure to find your local guild or club & dig in — if you already know your stuff, share with a newbie!
| #0.75, colorless quartz (Mt. Ida, AK, USA) | ||
|---|---|---|
| design | Easy 8 (Jeff Graham) | |
| weight | 3.78ct | |
| dim. | 11.3 x 11.2 x 8.74mm | |
| date | 1/17/2006 | |
Well, here it is. My first faceted stone. 3.78ct colorless quartz from Arkansas. It’s ill proportioned, badly polished and unfinished, but it’s officially done. I’ve made more than a beginner’s share of errors on this thing. I guess Tyler Miller was right when he told me that you learn the most from your first stone. We’ll see what I learned on the second one.
Why is the stone unfinished? It seems the dop assembly got frozen in transport to our new home. Since I used epoxy on this one, that was the proverbial kiss of death for the bond. When I set my machine up last night, the stone simply fell off the dop. I guess I could re-dop it and redo the entire crown, but that would be the 2nd redopping. The first redop introduced (at least) a spiral I couldn’t overcome. Who knows what another redopping would do. I decided to start with a new stone.
Lord willing, #2 won’t take me nearly a year to complete….
O.k., confession time: I took up faceting at the beginning of this year. Yep, the bug got me. Unfortunately, the faceting disease doesn’t come with it’s own time-space continuum, so I’m stuck learning my new-found interest on Sunday afternoons (when there is no church) and during the odd nap time when I can safely ignore other duties.
The official reason for taking it up now is that I want it to be a profitable part of my tiny gem business within 5 years. I have no illusions about acquiring skill quickly, but all of the people I’ve spoken with seem to think 5 years is a reasonable timeframe for someone to acquire enough skill to take stones from rough to saleable, or recut chunky native cuts to something attractive. Of course, being able to compete with the big-boys in the faceting world (quality-wise) will take a bit longer.
The unofficial reason for my timing is opportunity. I was able to acquire a Facetron faceting machine very close to or at wholesale from the company because it is a somewhat blemished machine (scratch on the facade). Of course, you can’t just buy the machine — you have to get the laps and some rough to start with. Oh, and I had to have a faceting grade trim saw to work up that Arkansas quartz we found last summer. Oh, and Jeff Graham had some polishes on sale at a fantastic price… and then there was this gem rough dealer who was liquidating his merchandise to get out of the business, so I had to take advantage of the opportunity, and once you have the equipment and rough, you can’t just let it sit there…
Did I mention faceting was a sickness?
My hope is to post fairly detailed articles as my adventures in cutting progress. I have benefitted a lot from advice on the USFGfaceterslist group and various websites (especially Jeff Graham’s excellent articles). Maybe my experiences will help someone else out. I’ll pretty this up with pictures when the babers give me a chance.
This weekend I’m going to the Richmond, IN rock show. It’s a small affair, but Tyler Miller, President of the Midwest Faceter’s Guild will be demonstrating. He said I could bring my machine & work along side him. The internet rocks, but there is no substitute for experienced, in person help!
