Digging Deep: Using Old Stones

My stone collecting obsession and how I’m trying to move forward.

Let’s get one thing straight from the get-go: I like rocks and always have. I’ve collected interesting rocks since I was a kid. You know — like when you’re out on a walk and you see one on the ground that catches your eye and it winds up in your pocket and later on your dresser.

Or when you’re on the beach with your family and you wind up picking up more rocks than shells and you keep them in a jar of water at home so they stay wet and shiny but become an algae-filled science experiment that disappears one day while you’re at school.

Or even in the school playground one afternoon in the 1970s when Steven Gaydos claims to have a moon rock and sells it to you for $2. (Yes, I was one of his suckers.)

Buy my jewelry!
After being encouraged (or nagged?) by too many other artist friends, I finally opened an Etsy shop to make it easy for folks to buy and for me to sell my finished pendants. It’s called MLGemstones. What I like about selling on Etsy is that it’s relatively easy to keep up-to-date — I can add pendants as I make them and remove them as I sell them — and Etsy does all the work to create for receipts and postage labels and calculate and pay sales tax.

Even when I got older and into a relationship, I collected pretty rocks. My future wasband did, too, which I always thought was natural. We’d go out in the desert and come back with a bunch of rocks. One day, while Jeeping out near Congress, AZ, we came upon a really nice, almost perfectly cubed piece of white quartz. It took three of us to get it in the back of the Jeep and it wound up in the front yard of our home. (It later disappeared; I don’t know if my wasband took it or someone looking at the house during the years it was for sale took it. I certainly had no use for it.)

Quartzsite Makes it Serious

Every year, when I lived in Arizona, I’d take at least one trip out to Quartzsite during the January rock shows. I exercised a lot of self-control in those days, but I did come home with rocks now and then. I had, by that time, seen the pattern of my rock acquisitions: find, bring home, set aside, lose, repeat. It made no sense to pay money for something I’d too quickly lose interest in.

After I moved to Washington state, I’d still go down to Quartzsite as part of my winter migration. And one year, I caught the rock bug bad.

Bacon Agate Pendant
It’s almost embarrassing to share this photo of my second pendant, but sometimes you need to look behind you to see how far you’ve come. I recently found this pendant (after misplacing it for a year) and plan to reframe it and wear it as a reminder of the rock that started it all.

It started with a rock seller giving me a nice, polished bacon agate cabochon. I had to do something with it. That’s when I started playing around with jewelry making. I was awful back then and never realized that I would get better. All I thought about then was that now that I had something useful to do with the rocks, it made sense to buy a few.

A few hundred, is more like it.

The Growing Collection

Kingman Turquoise
Kingman Turquoise with bronze is one of my best selling stones these days. I get these from a lapidary in Pennsylvania.

Since then — which was only two years ago this coming January — I’ve not only added to my collection, but I’ve begun displaying the stones in Riker boxes with felt inserts. Each box has a type of stone: jasper, agate, moss agate, jade/opal, turquoise/chrysocolla/azurite, etc. Each stone is meticulously inventoried with a tiny sticker on the back with its name, inventory number, and selling price. Yes, I now sell cabochons, too. I have become a rock dealer.

I get about half my stones in Quartzsite or Tucson every year. Honestly, I get better deals in Quartzsite so that’s where I mostly shop, starting as early as December.

I get another 45% of my stones from lapidaries — people who polish stones into the cabochons I use for my jewelry.

CabKing6
I bought one of these so I could polish local stones.

The final 5% are made in my shop. When I got rock fever bad enough, I bought a CabKing 6 cab making machine. I have a very large supply of local petrified wood and obsidian that I got in trade from a client. They both make very nice cabochons — when I have the time to polish them. Of course, once I got the machine, I started acquiring slabs of rock from all over the world so I could make my own cabochons. Unfortunately, I’ve been having trouble finding time to do that.

Selling Stones

My cabochons range in acquisition price from $1 to $20. I obviously sell them for more than that. I have them on display at venues where I sell my jewelry. I get a lot of rock lovers stopping by to look — some of them can spend 15 minutes or more at my booth looking and chatting with me. I enjoy sharing my knowledge and learning from some of them. And I love hearing their stories! I don’t even mind when they take up a bunch of my time and don’t buy anything. (The only thing I do mind is kids with dirty hands touching the tops of the display boxes. 🤯)

Fallon NV Wonderstone
This Fallon Nevada Wonderstone was one of the first “expensive” rocks I bought. I think I paid $15 for it. The pendant sold for $79 the other day.

Picasso Stone
This was the first Picasso stone cabochon I bought and I think it was the nicest. It sold last weekend.

Indian Blanket Jasper
This was one of the first 100 stones in my collection. I’ve since learned that square stones are a tough sell, but I suspect this one will eventually find a home.

Petrified Wood
I obtained this petrified wood cabochon long before I got about 100 pounds of local petrified wood in trade with one of my clients.

Ocean Jasper
I remember the day I bought this Ocean jasper cabochon and another very much like it in a Sacramento, CA bead shop. I paid too much (as I now know) but got my investment back (and more) when it sold last weekend.

Although the main reason I have the stones on display is to entice shoppers to have a custom pendant made from one of them — I can do it while they shop or have lunch — I also wind up selling a lot of stones. Just last February, I sold 20 stones over two days to a woman in Wickenburg, AZ — she came to my booth twice — and one day this past summer I sold 18 stones to a woman in Leavenworth, WA. These sales are good and bad. They’re good because I’m making money on inventory that requires no work other than cataloging and transporting. They’re bad because these folks often pick my best stones, leaving me with ones that aren’t quite as interesting or impressive. (Of course, that gives me an excuse to buy more.)

And then there are the folks who buy out my entire stock of one particular stone. I’ll see these folks at rock shows, like the one I do in Mesa, AZ every January. I discount all my cabochons by 20% to stay competitive with other rock sellers at the event. One day, a guy bought all of my K2 granite stones and the next day another guy bought all my bumblebee jasper stones. Fortunately, I went right back to Quartzsite the day after the show and was able to replenish my supplies.

Digging Deep

My stone inventory is listed by date and I still have a bunch of stones from my early days of collecting them. I’ve begun making a conscious effort to get these stones out of my inventory by making them into jewelry. And that’s what I’m showing off here: photos of stones I’ve had in my collection for over a year that I’ve finally made into jewelry.

It’s interesting to note that I started writing this blog post earlier this month when I began making these pendants. Since then, three of the five have sold. That tells me that even back when I first started collecting I had pretty good taste in stones.

Over time, I’ve learned what sells quickly and, when I get to Arizona, I’ll be stocking up on those stones. But I’ll also be on the lookout for some other beauties that I won’t be able to resist. When I find a stone I really like, I price it so high that no one wants to buy it so I can keep it as long as possible. But everyone seems to have their own idea of how much is too much and I often sell them to collectors anyway. That’s okay; it funds my future collections.

As for my current status, after buying and selling stones and pendants made from stones for nearly two years, I have 370 cabochons in my collection. Is it any wonder that rock lovers stop and stare when I have them laid out in my booth for everyone to see?

Booth Shot
My stones get their own table when I set up my jewelry booth at shows, like this Holiday Artisan Fair in Wenatchee last weekend.

A Tab-Mounted Gemstone Pendant

I make my first tab-mounted gemstone pendant.

Cabochon Definition
The definition of cabochon from Merriam-Webster dictionary.

I have about 500 gemstone cabochons in my collection these days. When customers marvel at them on display, I joke that “I make jewelry to support my stone habit.” Sadly, although it’s a pithy punchline, it’s also kind of true.

Picasso Stone Pendant
I made this Picasso Stone Jasper in sterling silver and copper pendant recently.

I use the cabochons (or “cabs”) three ways:

  • I make silver and/or copper framed pendants from cabochons I select from my collection.
  • I let customers select cabochons from my collection and make silver and/or copper framed pendants for them.
  • I sell cabochons from my collection. (Yes, I mark them up from their purchase price. No, I don’t double the cost to come up with my price.)

That Rose Quartz Cab

I purchase most of the cabochons at gem and mineral shows or directly from lapidaries. I do, however, also have a CabKing cabochon maker, which I can use to make my own cabs from rough or slabs. While I’m glad I have the CabKing, I honestly don’t use it enough to make it worth buying. The trouble is, it takes a long time to make a cab — sometimes an hour or more per stone. So unless I can’t get a cab elsewhere, it just doesn’t make sense for me to make it myself. At this point, I use it to make cabs from local stones such as petrified wood, obsidian, Ellensburg Blue agate, and Washington State jade.

But back when I first got it, I made a bunch of cabs from stones I’d bought to tumble. One of them was a piece of rose quartz that, for some reason, I’d cabbed into a triangle. (What was I thinking?) The piece sat in my collection for well over a year. It was time to do something with it.

Tab Mounting Ideas

I pulled it out on Sunday and took a good look at it. I wanted to use it with one point down, but I knew that it would look ridiculous framed in wire. And then I realized that it might be a candidate for a new (to me) technique I wanted to try: tab mounting.

Tab mounting requires you to take a piece of metal and cut tabs into it that you can then bend up and over the stone to secure it in place. I had seen a few videos about the technique and even read up on it in some of my jewelry making books. Coincidentally, I had passed on a jewelry making class in Tacoma that very weekend that covered tab-mounting. (I had already driven to the west side of the mountains three times this autumn and felt that was enough.) Maybe it was time to try it myself.

I took out a piece of paper and started sketching — which is something I rarely do. (I have no drawing skills.) I came up with an idea that might work, however, and got very excited about giving it a try. Unfortunately, I was at my day table booth in Pybus Market for the day and had agreed to meet a friend at the neighborhood winery afterwards. So it wasn’t until Monday morning, after dropping off my truck for some maintenance, that I had a chance to explore my idea.

Making the Pendant

Sketch 1
Here’s the sketch with the stone positioned on top. Because the stone was translucent, I wanted the area behind it to be mostly empty.

Sketch 2
Here’s the sketch without the stone. I shaded in the area that would be cut away.

Sketch Glued
I glued the sketch diagonally on one end of the metal strip.

After cutting
Here’s what the piece looked like after it was cut.

I started by re-sketching the idea. You see, it required a lot of cutting with a jeweler’s saw — a skill I learned last year during the three-day Beginner Intensive Metalworking class at the Tacoma Metal Arts Center. I’d been taught to take what I wanted to cut and paste it onto the metal with rubber cement. After it was cut, the paper could be peeled off.

So I traced the stone on paper, drew dashed lines to mark the center, sketched in the tabs I’d need to cut out, and then drew the pendant’s border around the stone. I shaded in the area that would be cut away, mostly so I wouldn’t make any mistake about where I cut.

Then I prepared the metal. I planned to use 22 gauge copper for this first experiment. I needed a piece approximately 2-1/4 inches wide so I cut a strip that wide with my bench shear. I wanted the metal textured and decided to use my rolling mill to keep the texture uniform. It was important to roll the copper before cutting it since rolling it tends to stretch it a bit. I picked a texture plate and rolled it out.

Next, I cut out my sketch with a pair of scissors and glued it to the textured metal. It didn’t matter which way the texture ran so I placed it on the metal to minimize waste.

Now the fun part (not!): cutting. There were two cutting techniques required for this piece:

  1. Cut around the outside of the template. This was easy — I did it with a pair of metal shears.
  2. Pierce cut along the black lines inside the pattern to remove the shaded area. This required me to drill a small hole in the shaded area (to pierce it) and then thread a thin blade on my jeweler’s saw through the hole. Then, resting the piece on my bench pin, I sawed on the lines. Although this wasn’t particularly difficult — the jeweler’s saw is made for this kind of work — it was time consuming. And I did break three saw blades. (#4/0 blades are a lot thinner than the #2 blade I use for most of my work. Fortunately, I buy all my blades in 24-blade package.)

Once it was cut out, I peeled away the paper and cleaned any remnants of glue off the piece. Then I spent a while doing my least favorite thing: filing and sanding the rough edges. One of these days, I will find the perfect tool for doing this quickly and consistently. Monday was not that day.

At this point, I could have mounted the stone and finish up. But I wanted to use another technique to add some creative elements to the metal: fusing sterling silver onto its surface. I dug into my sterling scrap bag — I recycle all my sterling silver — and pulled out a piece of 22 gauge square wire. I cut it to length and curled its ends into a pair of spirals. Then I took my beloved solder cutting tool and chopped up the remaining square wire into tiny pieces. I positioned all this silver onto various places on the textured copper and laid it out on the charcoal block at my soldering station.


I cannot say enough good things about this torch, which can supposedly reach 2500°F and doesn’t have sissy features like child-proof ignition.

I used my new Blazer Big Shot butane torch to melt the silver onto the copper. This is something I’d learned earlier in the month at a jewelry making class. It’s not difficult to do, but it does require your full attention and quick reflexes. I wanted the tiny chips fully melted but I wanted to retain the shape of the swirls. I think I did a decent job, although I wish I could have melted the left swirl a little better.

As you might imagine, the copper got very hot — glowing red. I let it cool naturally on the block for a short while, which really didn’t make sense because charcoal really holds the heat. Finally, I quenched it in some water and dried it off. It was very black. I used a 280 grit radial polisher on my flex shaft to clean it off, then repeated the process with a 400 grit polisher to give it more shine.

I was going to do some fire painting to bring some more color into the copper, but so little copper showed through the silver that I didn’t think it was worthwhile.

Finished Pendant
Here’s the almost finished piece. I still have to add a bail at the top. It’s interesting the way the silver appears shiny in some places and blackened in others. I like that look. I’ll probably make a pair of simple copper with fused silver earrings to go with it, using the same spiral motif.

So, instead, I just mounted the stone. It was easy enough to do: I pulled the four tabs forward, bending them where they joined the rest of the piece. To my utter amazement, the stone fit perfectly between them. I bent the tabs back over the stone. It was all very easy to do since the piece had been annealed when I melted the silver.

I’m very happy with the results. I know that this kind of jewelry isn’t for everyone, but neither are my sterling/copper framed cabochon pendants. I think it’s important to have a variety of items to appeal to many people. I can see making a “line” of jewelry in this style. Every piece, of course, would be different.

I can make silver pendants this way, but I can’t melt copper onto them. I’d have to use other techniques to make the pendant’s backing interesting: texturing, stamping, antiquing, etc. It’s exciting to me, in a way, because I get to try different things. When I show them at art shows, etc., I see the reaction of shoppers and learn what works and doesn’t work.

Jewelry Making: How Far I’ve Come

A quick post to remark at how far I’ve come since I began making jewelry.

Photos don’t lie. At least mine don’t.

First Piece
The very first piece of gemstone jewelry I made.

I spent some time organizing the Photos library on my Mac. I’ve got 18,000+ photos and I’m constantly trying to delete the crap and tag/sort/organize what’s left. A while back, I created a folder called Jewelry (All) and I periodically drag all photos in any way related to my jewelry making into that folder. Today, I scrolled back to the earliest photos in there and found an image of my very first piece.

Ick.

The stone was a piece of labradorite that I got for about a buck in Quartzsite. The wire was round silver-plated craft wire. I made this piece after watching this video on YouTube. Although I was impressed with this video back in January when I started down this path, I do not recommend it now. What should have tipped me off was her use of hardware store pliers, which really make a mess of the metal. If you’re interested at all in making jewelry with wire and stones, watch it just to get a really good idea of why “wire wrap” has a bad reputation in the jewelry world. There’s a lot of crap out there and this video will teach you how to make some more.

A good starter video

If you’re looking for a good how-to video for making wire-framed gemstone jewelry, check out this one by OxanaCrafts. Oxana got me started wrapping my bails and I actually find it difficult to make a piece without a wrapped bail. She uses a thicker gauge copper in all of her work — 20 or 21 gauge vs the 22 or 24 gauge mostly sterling silver I use — and I don’t think she’s quite as particular as I am about her stones. For me, the wire work is a vehicle for delivering a beautiful stone; her work, like so many other “wire wrap artists,” is more about the wire work than the stone. Different philosophies, and that’s okay.

As I talk about in other posts tagged jewelry, I’ve come a long way since then. Getting a lesson from a real jewelry maker really helped. Watching a few better tutorials on YouTube helped me develop and fine-tune my own style. The rest was all practice, practice, practice.

At this point, I think I’ve made about 250 to 300 pendants. In the beginning, it took about two hours to make each pendant. I can now knock an easy one off in about 30 minutes. (“Easy” is determined primarily by the size and shape of the stone.)

I sell my work primarily at Pybus Public Market in Wenatchee, WA. I have a “day table” there three days a week: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I’m one of several artisans that come regularly to sell their work — and the closer we get to Christmas, the more of us there are. I get lots of complements from people who actually bother to stop and take a closer look at my work. And that’s nice. But what’s really nice is when another jewelry artist stops by and complements me. That happens more often than I thought it might.

When people ask me how long I’ve been doing this, I ask them to guess. Guesses have ranged from “a few years” to “15 or 20 years.” I have to say that I’m pretty tickled about that. I don’t ever tell them the truth. Instead, I say something evasive or vague like, “Not as long as you might think” or “It’s been a while now.” You’d be surprised how easy it is to get away with something like that. People don’t even realize it when you don’t give them a definitive answer for a question.

My work will soon be in two galleries: Two Rivers Art Gallery in Wenatchee, which has carried my work since this past summer, and Gallery One in Ellensburg, where I’ve participated in an artist event and will be teaching gemstone framing this coming Sunday.

I also sell online: https://squareup.com/store/MLJewelryDesigns

I should mention here that I’ve also branched off into other wire work. I make earrings, bracelets, and even rings, which I can sell for (mostly) less than my pendants. I don’t enjoy doing any of those nearly as much as I like making the gemstone pendants, though. The pendants give me an excuse to buy stones and I really do have a stone addiction to feed. Besides, do you know how tedious it is to hand cut, shape, hammer, and join 13 identical pieces of wire to make a bracelet chain?

Dendritic Agate Pendant
This is my most recently completed pendant, which I made yesterday. It’s a tiny, partially translucent piece of dendritic agate, framed with 24 gauge square and half-round sterling silver wire. Tiny pieces are tough for me — my hands are not small — and I’m extremely pleased with the way this one came out. It’s headed for Gallery One in Ellensburg where I hope it makes a nice Christmas present for someone who loves stones as much as I do.

Looking at the photos in that Jewelry (All) album gives me a chance to see my progress over time. But what was also interesting to me yesterday was looking at some recent work posted by my mentor, Dorothy, on Facebook. I can see the similarities, but I can also see where our styles have diverged. Back in January, when she taught me to frame gemstones the way she does, my first piece could have passed for one of her simple ones. Now they’re very different.

Yes, I’ve come a remarkably long way since January 2018. And what I’m really pleased about is how it hasn’t gotten boring yet. This might just be my retirement career.