Copper ore & metal mineral beads & cabs

Howdy DVHdesigns Fans,

I've been on a bit of a spree around metal minerals recently! I grew up in a rock club in Michigan and there were always crazy bits of high grade metal mineral ores from the Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan's Upper Peninsula passed around amongst the rockhounds and we went there once to collect on the mine dumps. As an adult and professional lapidary, I've delved deeper into working withmetal minerals and ores. There's an aspect of alchemy in it for me, taking the base metal and without smelting it, recreating it into something that has more value than the metals contained within. It's also neat to see, cut, and feel the density and intensity of the rocks and ores from which we get the metals necessary to modern life.

In some materials like the native copper, the veins of copper are from the purest deposits on Earth and native peoples were able to use and fashion this metal over 6,000 years ago. It was traded from the original deposits in the U.P. down the Mississippi and ancient Native American copper artifacts have been found as far away as Alabama. I made this bead out of a material called Kingston Conglomerate. It's like a natural concrete of brown and green stones with solid, dense veins of nearly pure copper running all through it like spiderwebs! Because the metal is so reflective it's a challenge to get it to show up in the image, but all the bronze-brown-shiny webbing in this bead is native copper...

My brother knows of my passion for metal minerals so I got a box of nice, exotic, rough ores for my birthday! By far the best was the high grade silver ore from Sudbury, Ontario. 1.4 billion years ago (right around the time the first fungal and bacterial life forms appeared on Earth), a giant meteroite slammed into the area of Canada just north of Lake Superior. The intense heat fused the metals in the Earth's crust together in this region creating one of the most metal ore rich areas on Earth. There was probably also a lot of iron and nickle in the meteorite that were mixed in. These beads and cabs were made from a high grade silver ore from that area. The ore is mixed with bits of cobalt, nickle, and other metals, but very close examination of the crystalline structures of the metal oxides along with drill testing revealed that this ore is more silver than the other metals. Unlike the cobalt ore, my drill bit actually encounters solid bits of silver metal while drilling these...

I also got a very intersting chunk of pyrite-marcasite that is heavily silicated (mixed in with and turned to quartz). Pyrite & Marcasite are about the same thing, mostly iron and sulfur, and were mined more for the sulfur content than the iron. Although it's shiny and golden metallic looking (commonly called "fools gold"), it can be very brittle in it's pure or more crystalline state. What's great about the piece I got is that the silication makes it very strong and stable with great bronzey and black variegation. This material is from Australia and I just got one piece of it, so don't know if more is available. I haven't seen it in suitable lapidary form like this before!


I'll conclude with Psilomelane, a manganese oxide, and the material I cut is usually heavily silicated. This lovely piece of dendritic psilomelane in chalcedony (quartz) with fine drusy quartz crystals at the top. This material is MOSTLY quartz, but the black dendrites of psilomelane are mostly a manganese oxide. It comes from N. Mexico but the few hobby mines that produced it have closed. Manganese is used to make alloys of steel and aluminum that are stronger and more resistant to oxidation (rust).


and this piece of psilomelane mixed with white agate. This second piece is probably from Northern Mexico. The manganese can make the chalcedony and agate EXTRA hard and very challenging to drill!


Thanks for looking! I'll return to metal minerals soon, although I'm probably going to be cutting mostly jet and soft things for awhile.

P.S. I'm also having a 30% off inventory clearance in my eBay store!

Petrifed Wood, Dino Bone & "The Tree of Life" Series of DVH beads

I recently attended a Spirit Dance where for 5 days we did ceremony, prayers, and dance in a circle around a tree that represented "The Tree of Life." One of the things I took away from the dance was the notion that I need to keep dancing around that tree in my everyday life, and what better "Tree of Life" to dance around than the petrified wood here in my studio! Thus begins the "The Tree of Life" series of petrified wood beads from DVHdesigns. I also consider other petrified organic matter, such as petrified dinosaur bone, algae, coprolites, etc. to be a part of the "The Tree of Life" so I'll also share those here. While looking into and studying rocks as I cut them, I have a strong sense of "looking back in time" at a snapshot of the earths creation, from an era before and during the long evolution of life here on this planet. When working with petrified fossils of organic matter, that glimpse into "geological time" takes on all new levels of meaning and connection for me.
If you're interested in the metaphysical aspects of petrified wood, here is some info I got off the internet and from Melody's book, "Love is in the Earth"; because it is silicated, or turned to quartz, it also has the metaphysical properties of quartz and other forms of quartz such as chalcedony or agate. Petrified wood is a stone that is good for grounding and stabilizing one's emotions. It is particularly useful in calming survival-based fears. Provides support for those going through a crisis period of dis-ease, acts as a stone of transformation to help one advance in life to appropriate chosen levels. It helps one be practical. It is a stone of business success. Petrified wood is a good stone for general protection. Physically, it is beneficial physically for the bones, backaches, skin and hair. Petrified wood is also used for past life regressions because of its inherent link with the past.
Here is an example of Opalized Wood from Washington.

This wood didn't petrify into hard silicated, quartz material, like most petrified woods. Instead it turned into a form of opal (common, not fire), which is also silica, but with a different and larger molecular structure, making it more brittle and challenging to work with than regular petrified wood. I wood treat opalized wood like a big glass or porcelain bead, as opposed to a regular "rock" or "stone" bead. and this "heart of stone" is also an opalized "wooden heart"

These next two are petrified palm wood found near the border of Texas & Louisiana. This wood is a rare and very desirable material among North American lapidaries. This first little wedge bead is the more common color and patterning, which ranges from various shades of beige and tan with the spots in darker complimentary colors. The dots are the vertical cellular structure of the palm tree trunk (if cut sideways one gets wispy lines, not quite as dramatic). In this first piece there is a little cluster of cells that didn't fully agatize and one of them goes all the way through the bead. I centered that hole in the lower part when I cut it so that the hole could be used as a place to seed bead through onto either side, as a beading station, or it could be used to attach some other small embellisment by a jeweler.

This larger wedge bead is also petrified palm from the same region, but the center of the trunk of the tree was affected by some kind of sulfur compounds during it's petrification, turning it black but leaving the outer region with the tan color. One can still see the dots in the blackness. These bi-color black & tan pieces of palm are highly prized finds for a cutter. I've never seen anyone else make beads out of them. I only have one chunk of this material that I scored in Tucson last year. I try to balance the colors in one piece, creating a truly yin-yang, heaven & earth, light & dark, two spirit kind of effect. I'll have to be sure to save one of these for myself at some point as I can probably only make another half dozen "black & tans" with the material I have left...

I guess I can't get y'all excited by mentioning dino bone without showing ya some, so here's a nice petrified dinosaur bone made with a piece collected from the Colorado plateau. This has a nice earthy, brick red color and the patterns of cell structure of the marrow of the bone are noticeable. Dino bone is more highly prized when there is more contrast between the colors of the cell structure and wall, with black and brick red highly regarded. I love that if one looks close, this dino bone heart has a small healed fracture in it too. Another one for my Broken Hearts Club Band....
That's all for now folks. Thanks for letting me share. Time to get back to the grind. There's some sycamore & 260 million year old tree fern asking me to dance....

Hey Bead Lovers! Here's some lovely pieces I made out of new material I got when I was in Tucson last month. I got one chunk of this material called Sonora Sunrise from Sonora, Mexico. It's a beautful sky blue chrysocolla with firey red cuprite and I believe that the black is tenorite. They are all secondary minerals after copper. I only got three beads out of the one fist sized chunk of rough I got and these are the two big dramatic ones... I picked up a pound of massive kyanite crystals from Tanzania and cut these two pieces. The dealer is a German fellow who is from near Idar Oberstein and deals only in Tanzanian gemstones. I really love the cats eye effect and schiller that make these appear like a blue gray lightning captured in stone...

and I got this super adulaurescent sunstone from Tanzania from the same dealer. If one looks at the edge of this sunstone bead there is a moonstone effect on the side, sort of like a sunstone-moonstone hybrid!

. That's it for now. I'm cutting quite a few new things so more to come!

New grindings, returned from Tucson...

Hey all, made it home from Tucson and the annual hajj to Gemstone Mecca! Finally settling back into the studio and breaking in some INCREDIBLE new diamond wheels, playing with new treasures, and breaking out some old treasures that were too hard for me to cut with my old worn wheels. It's such a wonderful feeling to have a really, really hard jasper or agate just melt underneath your fingers as you bring the shape out of the stone. Good diamonds are a lapidary artists best friend....

My new grindings from February 19th. First rough grind on my new, rock devouring, 60 grit, 8"x2" diamond grinding wheel, Sachi. I named her after the company from India she came from. That's Sachi on the left. She's a realllllly good girl and was a SWEET deal! She chewed up all those stones in no time and those were some hard puppies, I picked them out special to break her in and test her out. Front row, L to R, Gem Chrysocolla (not turquoise), Indonesian Purple Seam Agate, two Willow Creeks (yes, both the maroon and the ivory one came from the same mine in Idaho), Indonesian Lace Agate, Aussie Tigerye, Texas Petrified Palm Wood, Sudbury Shiny Cobalt Ore (some silver & arsenic mixed in, for sure), and the oval at the end is an Brazilian Oco Agate geode filled with sparkling drusy quartz crystals. All will be bead focal pendants. The second row is more stuff! This is just the first stage, rough cut. They need at least another grinding at 120 grit, then sandings at 120, 220, 600, 1200, 3000 grits and THEN a polish.... cutting rocks is hard.

Lapidary Journal profile of DVHdesigns, 12/95

I thought this would be a good place to post some articles that have been written about me and my work. Here is a profile that Lapidary Journal did on me back in December 1995. Click on any of the pages to enlarge them to read.

Moonstone memories....

Howdy all. Time for me to start blogging about my work. Friday night was the biggest full moon of the year, and as I wasn't going to a full moon heart circle, I stayed in the studio and did my own moon ritual. I worked on some Norwegian Moonstone (also known as Blue Pearl Granite or Larvakite). I got it from the backyard rock pile of my beloved, Ti, as he was packing to move. I really love the way this large lingam turned out and the silvery blue flashes in this material have always been a favorite.



I moved on and did some classic moonstone from India as well. This large teardrop shaped bead has great orientation and adularescence! There are some internal healed fractures, but it is completely stable and quite a brilliant piece! I also have some green moonstones in process, but my motor on my special lapidary grinder broke down and I can't finish them! Argh! Anyhow, here is the silver grey moonstone bead....


I had one very special piece of bowlerite that has a rare, perfectly round, pure white inclusion in it, very evocative of our giant full moon! So I made a red bowlerite full moon heart out of it!

Finally, I took a piece of computer hard drive, labratory grown, silicon that was from a massive broken silicon cyclinder reject, and made this sort of "broken crescent winter moon" from it! The perfect gift for the computer geek!
Ok, I'm starting to get the hang of this. Please feel free to visit my eBay store, DVHdesigns!