Latest Creations

While it has been a pretty benign winter to date, it is still too cold to do much in the lapidary shop so the focus shifts to the jewelry bench. Over the past months, we have been busy creating items for sale on our new on-line venture- The Seawall Emporium. First, we created a number of pendants featuring beautiful petrified wood from Arizona.

Then we started working on copper pieces and made everything from the simple to the complex.

The REAL Viking artist taught me how to make Viking Chain and we made several beautiful bracelets.

And recently, we started working with an exciting new material- used guitar strings! These strings are amazingly complex and have characteristics that offer exciting design opportunities.

We were so excited we formed a new collection- The Phoenix Collection- to celebrate the potential for this upcycled material. It can be used for lightweight earrings (above) as well as more elaborate pendants and necklaces (below). In fact, we're just starting to explore the possibilities!

And we even had time to create some commissioned pieces.

So what's next? Well, the days are getting longer and soon we'll be back on the machines. I have a big backlog of rock to be slabbed. We have decided to open the Artist's Mark Shop this summer and while we don't expect as many visitors as in previous years, we look forward to meeting some new friends so if your travels take you to Nova Scotia, look us up!

Time To Move To "Studio B"

 Well, the days are getting shorter (and cooler!) and the sun is rising farther south each day so it is almost time to shut down the machines in The Lap of Lapidary and move to my little corner of Vickie's studio (she's the REAL artist!) to start fabricating new pieces from the stones I have finished. This winter I intend to do a lot of metal work and one thing we needed to address was the lighting. We were getting by on a hodgepodge of fluorescent, incandescent and halogen and it was sometimes dark and difficult to take good pictures. 

So yesterday we installed halogen track lighting with 18 lights and boy was it worth it- even the cats approve!

Here's a video of the end result.

I also intend to make several more pieces incorporating used guitar strings. The customer was very pleased with the first one and I really like the way it works with larger stones. It actually makes them feel lighter.

Here's the first one in its new home.

For this one I used a steel string and combined it with an antique sterling silver bail that matched perfectly. Who knows, I might even try to weave a bracelet! All these pieces will be available at our new web site- the Seawall Emporium- when it is up and running in a week or so. I'll keep you posted.

Stay healthy and sane!

The Eye of the Tiger

 Summer is gradually coming to a close and the sun is appearing farther south on the horizon every morning. The mornings aren't yet cold enough to turn on heat but we're getting there.

The good old Lot-O-Tumbler is doing its last load for the year and once I have worked a few stones for "She Who MUST Be Obeyed" I'll start cleaning the machines and the Lap of Lapidary will be shut down except for the drill press that I'll continue to use for metalwork through the winter.

Last year I participated in a little product research for Hi-Tech Diamond, a great American lapidary equipment company and as thanks, they gifted me with a beautiful thick slab of Tiger's Eye. This material appears to be the type formed by altered asbestos or chrysotile so I call it the ugly duckling. It starts life as an ugly, potentially dangerous mineral and, after it has been altered by silicate fluids, it becomes an amazingly beautiful gem rock that exhibits "chatoyance" or a shimmer of light that causes the stone to look different as it moves. It's an amazing, complex process that I won't go into here but the results it produces are visually stunning.

When I got the slab, I immediately knew what I wanted to do with it. It was large enough for me to get 3 pendants and thick enough for me to do a complete drop- that is curved surface front and back. I needed 3 pendants of differing size- the largest for Vickie my wife (she with the agate eye), a medium sized one for my older daughter Lisa and a smaller one for daughter Sandra- the runt of the litter.

First step was to define the shapes using a magic marker and doing a rough cut of the slab. I used my 10 inch Hi-Tech saw because the slab was so thick. Then I ground out the outside shapes on my new (and much loved!) Cab King cabbing machine.

Next, while the stones still had flat surfaces front and back, I located the mid point and cut a groove around the perimeter as shown in this stone, using a machine with a 1 mm. bit that lets me cut horizontal grooves.

The groove holds the wire I use to set the stone and doing it with a flat surface lets you make a nice straight cut. I like using this technique because it doesn't interfere with the colour or patterning of the stone.

Then it was back to the Cab King to grind the curved shapes on both sides, smooth them out and then polish with a mixture of tin and cerium oxide. I love the results!

I used bronze wire to complement the golden yellow of the stones and now the girls just have to decide what they want me to hang them on. Here's a video showing the effect of chatoyance but in all honesty, it is much more pronounced in person.

I hope you enjoy this and now it's on to new adventures. We have almost completed work on our new web site and enterprise- the Seawall Emporium- and I am now figuring out how I can incorporate old guitar strings in my creations so stay tuned (get it?)  and stay sane and healthy!