Super Sunday Cabbing

Super Bowl Sunday, and I get to cab til the game starts. Thats a wonderful day!.

I cabbed a small piece of Chrysocolla drusy that as left from a piece of stone I won on the Taogem forum.  It had some amazing blue green or teal colored druse and dark green malachite druse.  Its from Nuevo Mundo Imports. I highly recommend them if you want the best chrysocolla and malachite drusy. The crystals are so clear and shiny. Awesome stuff. Its pricey but you get what you pay for. I also cabbed another quartz drusy cab.

I also cabbed a Queensland agate. The Queensland agate has some very nice patterning and layers, plus a little drusy in the middle. Love it!

The icing on the cake?
Green bay won! yay!!

Back in the swing

Back in the swing of cabbing anyway.  I’ve been away from my cabbing equipment for awhile and it sure is good to be back at it.  I was so excited that I couldn’t decide what I wanted to polish first.  It was even a bit hard to concentrate.  I found that I wanted to polish all the lil slabs I had cut.  Which is way too many. So I started a few and only finished four.  As soon as I get a chance I will finish the others.  I ended up with a drusy quartz cab, a laguna agate, a queensland agate cab, and a chrysocolla cab.

I had read on a forum awhile back that one of the members there would mix a few different polishes and get a glass like shine on his cabs. So I tried it out.  I mixed some red rouge, green polishing rouge, and cerium oxide equal parts. I got a really good polish but I think it needs to be mixed with something other than water.  I didn’t like the consistency.

God is truly wonderful. It always amazes me when I cut a rock open and inside there’s this amazing pattern that you would never have thought could be in there.   I can sit in awe just checking out a small slab of rock.  I suppose this is my kind of meditation.  All the layers and colors. Awesome!!

The pink Queensland agate just formed itself. All I had to do was take off the ugly brown stuff from the outside and  it was already a heart.  Not a perfect heart, but then who has a perfect heart?

The other cabs were just as much fun to make, the drusy has been on my mind for awhile, since drusy jewelry is all the rage now.  The little crystals are so pretty and catch the light like stars.

Thanks for coming by,

Until next time…

Silver in a coin

While looking thru some videos on youtube, I came across a really interesting one about taking a quarter and making a ring out of it. Well! I had never heard of this, and I just couldn’t stop looking for other videos or links to read. There are actually 2 ways to do this. You can make the ring to where the writing on the coin shows on both the inside and outside of the ring, or you can make it to where only the inside will show the writing and outside will be a beautiful shiny band of whatever metal your coin is made of. I tried to make one out of a new penny but its pretty sad that even a penny isn’t really copper anymore isn’t it? Made for a pretty ugly ring. So thankfully a couple of really good enablers gave me a couple of quarters that are actually made of silver. Anything older than 1964 works great. I drilled a small hole in the middle of the coin, then used a jewelers saw to cut out the middle. Then I put the donut looking piece put it on a ring mandrel and started to pound on it with a rubber hammer. You just keep hitting it down the mandrel until it won’t go anymore, by then its pretty flat against the mandrel. Just make sure you hit a couple times then turn the mandrel a little then hit some more. Then you take it off the mandrel, I annealed it to soften it, put it back on the mandrel, the other side up and hit it some more to take the cone shape off and finish it with a little polish. You can use a little oxidizer to make the writing really show. With practice you can make them any size you like. It was fun and there are so many pretty coins out there!
This is my favorite link about the coins, the pictures at the bottom of all the different coins is what hooked me.

Click to access HowtomakeaCoinRings%5B2%5D.pdf

I think that since its a pdf it won’t show as a link so you have to copy the whole link and put it in a browser. But its really worth the read.
Here’s a couple of pics of my attempt and I think I’ll be making more of these. I like the thought of a couple having rings of each others birth year. But then you would have to be born 1964 or before, to get the really good silver.

Well thanks for stopping by and I hope you get to try and make a few rings for yourself. Let me know if do or if you find any other cool jewelry making ideas.

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 3,000 times in 2010. That’s about 7 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 14 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 50 posts. There were 103 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 49mb. That’s about 2 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was January 7th with 257 views. The most popular post that day was Greenstones.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were gemstone.smfforfree4.com, wbx.me, en.wordpress.com, search.aol.com, and andy321.proboards.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for chlorastrolite, green stones, michigan state gem, flowering tube onyx, and michigan greenstone.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Greenstones June 2009
4 comments

2

A little bit about me March 2009

3

Wire wrapping frenzy September 2009

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Rock treasures!

Even if I haven’t been able to work on any rocks lately, It doesn’t mean I haven’t been looking for any. I have to keep adding to the collection right? Don’t ask my husband that question.. Anyway.. I went to a local flea market and what do you know? There was a booth with a few large rocks on a corner. The woman said she had quite a few and would be happy to make a deal for them all since her husband didn’t want to keep lugging them around. I was pretty excited when she quoted me a pretty low price and even let me use her hand truck to get them to my truck. lol Here are some pics, you can click on them to read more or see them larger.


Have a safe weekend!!!

A New Chapter

In life that is. I’m in a bit of a transition and have deactivated my Etsy shop as well as my market place on Metalworkers.org. I will be opening them up again and adding more pieces as soon as things are all settled. Wish me luck, say a little prayer and stay safe!!

Don’t you just love cloudy days, where you just wanna stay home and just veg? I do! But instead of just vegging out, I cut up a few slabs and got some cabbing in. I’ve had a couple of slabs that I’ve been wanting to cab but I had been putting it off. One was pet wood and it has a really cool picture in the stone. I had been worried that it would crack or mess up, and I couldn’t bear the thought of messing it up. But it kept calling me, so I finally just went for it. I’m glad I did too. Funny or odd thing is that the Mookite or Mookaite also has a face in it. Although its a little different. Anytime you get a cabochon from an artist its unique and this just goes to show how unique they can get.
I’m also adding pictures of the second jade carving I finally finished. It seems to have taken forever to finish this one. I really enjoy carving jade, but it seems like I get a bit obsessed and have no time for wrapping. I found the stone at Jade cove and wanted to leave the shape pretty much the same as when I found it. But I wanted to carve some sort of design in the middle of it so that it could be worn. After carving it, I added a small faceted sapphire in the center.


Well so far so good and another day to go. Hope you have a great weekend!

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