The Military Dog Tag Project

Matthew 5:9 Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God

Howdy Folks, over the past several years I've sporadically made a number of bead-dangles that are a part of what I call my "Dog Tag Series". The shapes are simple and based on the shape of the classic military dog tag that soldiers wear. I mostly make them out of jet, which is a traditional mourning jewel to help folks, especially members of the military, veterans, and their families deal with their grief, but I've made them out of all different kinds of stones, including lapis lazuli.

For me it's a kind of reclaiming of a symbol. The military dog tags represent an individual soldiers identity and their place in the military. My stone dog tags are made with diverse material that come from all around the Earth and are made directly from the Earth itself. They don't have any other identifying characteristics other than the elemental "source" from which they come. My intention is for these dog tags to serve as reminders and mementos to all those who perish in military conflicts and those affected by these tragedies. I've come to a point in my life where I don't want to just be someone who is simply politically "Anti-War" but rather someone who is actively "Pro-Peace" and does something about it other than simply demand to bring the troops home and stop fighting. It's not realistic. I was also quite impressed by President Obama's acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize.

For that reason, out of all the dog tags I'm making and listing in my DVHdesigns eBay Store, 25% of the gross sales price will either go to Mercy Corps, a Portland, Oregon based non-profit doing sustainable aid and education in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and around the world, or 25% will go to American Combat Veterans of War, a San Diego based all volunteer group which "is a nonprofit organization that recruits combat veteran volunteers to mentor, coach and assist our warriors suffering from combat stress, allowing them and their families to lead productive and fulfilling lives." I know it's not much, but at least I feel like I'm doing something to help the poor people throughout the world who live in situations that foster conflicts, and I'm also reaching out to those American soldiers who come home so traumatized by their participation in those conflicts which they had no part in creating.

I've recently started a larger series of these dog tags specifically in jet, to help those greived everywhere by the loss of life from military action, as well as making more and more in lapis lazuli for those interested in and affected by the Afghanistan conflict, also known as Operation Enduring Freedom.

Matthew 5:4 Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted

Each jet dog tag bead is hand made by me here in my studio in Portland, OR. On these pieces I used Russian jet from near Lake Baikal, which is just north of Mongolia and NE of Afghanistan. While I support our intervention in Afghanistan and pray for a peaceful outcome, I am grieved by the whole long bloody conflict, from the time of the Russian invasion in 1979 until now, 30 years later. I make these jet dog tags in memory of all the soldiers and all their families, in all countries, affected by not only this long and tragic conflict, but also in memory of all those who died in the violent wars and conflicts of the past century.

Here is a selection of dog tags and mini dog tag charms that I've made in lapis lazuli...

Lapis Lazuli has been mined in Afghanistan for 6,000 years. It was used by the Egyptians for everything from jewelry, to eye shadow, to blue paint. In fact, up until the early 1800's, almost all the blue paint in the world was made with ground lapis pigment. I have left these particular pieces with a satinny matte finish. The stone feels different when one touches it without a layer of polish between the wearer and the stone. I think these would make a wonderful gift for a soldier who is or has been deployed to Afghanistan, for one of their family members or friends, or for any individual who cares about the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan. It can serve as a kind of "touchstone", letting the wearer feel a little piece of Afghanistan as they pray for peace in the region.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading and I appreciate your thoughts, prayers, feedback, and support as I continue this project.

Recycled Art Glass & Obsidian

Hi all, I just did another batch of the recycled art glass beads. Here's a group shot of the pieces that I just got finished and listed. I like the frosty clarity and all the different widths and colors that arch through the beads.

I've also cut some more "baby snowflake" obsidian and I'm particularly fond of this bead that I just put in my eBay store as well...

Someone asked if the snowflakes were caused by "ash" in the obsidian. The official explanation for the cause of the "snowflakes" and other features of obsidian is as follows...(info pulled from the internet).....
"Obsidian is mineral-like, but not a true mineral because as a glass it is not crystalline; in addition, its composition is too complex to comprise a single mineral. It is sometimes classified as a mineraloid. Though obsidian is dark in color similar to mafic rocks such as basalt, obsidian's composition is extremely felsic. Obsidian consists mainly of SiO2 (silicon dioxide), usually 70% or more.....Pure obsidian is usually dark in appearance, though the color varies depending on the presence of impurities. Iron and magnesium typically give the obsidian a dark green to brown to black color. A very few samples are nearly colorless. In some stones, the inclusion of small, white, radially clustered crystals of cristobalite in the black glass produce a blotchy or snowflake pattern (snowflake obsidian). It may contain patterns of gas bubbles remaining from the lava flow, aligned along layers created as the molten rock was flowing before being cooled. These bubbles can produce interesting effects such as a golden sheen (sheen obsidian) or a rainbow sheen (rainbow obsidian)."

I recently got THREE disks of trafficlightite off of eBay, so sometime in the next week or two I'll be working on sets of red, yellow, and green beads! Stay tuned and I'll keep ya posted.
It is COLD here in Portland! 25 degrees and it feels like 12. Even though my studio is pretty well insulated and heated, it's hard to get it over 60 degrees in here andmy hands get pretty cold working in water all the time. At least we're having sunny days. Well thanks for letting me share! Back to the grind...

Return of Bowlerite! With a GRAPE FLAVOR!

Howdy DVHdesigns Fans!

I've been back to cutting bowlerite! I just did the Portland Bead Society Bead Bazaar two weekends ago. The show is great and I LOVE the PBS, but sales were certainly off. Of course they were for everyone and I've heard that most bead shows are way off this year for most people. However, out of all the things I DID sell, 80% of my sales were BOWLERITE! I'm pretty well know for cutting this stuff and when people see it on my table they always stop, handle it, and smile when they hear what it is! Here's some group pics of stuff I just put up in my eBay store, freeform focals in lots of different colors...



and here's some new hearts I just did....




The really crazy thing, is that I made two heart beads out of a REALLY RARE kind of bowlerite sphere. I got one purple and teal swirled ball about two years ago and it SMELLED different from the other bowlerite I was cutting! At first I thought I was having olfacatory flashbacks, or maybe there was just something different in the resin. Well when I realized the faint smell persisted AFTER I had finished cutting them, I had some friends smell them, and they finally helped me realize that they smelled like artificial GRAPE (like soda, dum-dum lollipops, or gum that has that "purple grape" flavor or smell). Well I looked on the internet (of course!) and found out that Storm bowling ball manufactures has a whole LINE of scented balls! They've tried over 100 "flavors" and grape was the first one! They even tried a scented one, that they said stunk! The article in the link above is pretty funny! Anyhow, here are two grape scented hearts made out of the same ball... Pretty bizarre, huh?





That's it for now folks! In case anyone's interested I'm having a 30% off sale on most stone beads in my eBay store this week and I have 99 cent, no reserve, auctions closing tomorrow evening, Sunday. Happy Thanksgiving week!

Sunstone Moonstone Hybrid from Tanzania

Above, we see this particular variety of sunstone shows a moonstone effect on the opposing axes of the sunstone, almost like a sun and moon hybrid!
This is a new, spectacular gemmy sunstone material from Tanzania that is as good or better than the more commonly found sunstone from India. I hand cut this shield shaped bead which measures 40x27mm and is 12mm thick with a 3mm drill hole. It has a high polished finish. There are several healed fractures in this bead, but they don't threaten the structural integrity of the stone. The adularescent AND aventurescent qualities of this stone are just stunning! The images give you just a hint of how these well oriented stones go from coppery orange base color to a nearly blinding coppery whitish brilliance! White veining and some dark grey spots create an ethereal & spacey effect!

Here is what June Culp Zeitner of Lapidary Journal fame says about sunstone in her book, "Gem and Lapidary Materials,".... "Sunstone is an aventurescent labradorite, microcline, or oligoclase feldspar, distinguished by minute hematite or goethite inclusions which reflect the light" She goes on to say that some microcline sunstones like this one show both aventurescence and adularescence.

Some of the mystic lore that has been said about sunstone is that it is a stone of leadership, dispels fear and stress, increases vitality, encourages independence and originality, warms the spirit and brings good fortune!

Iloite Sunstone

A wonderful deep blue iolite with silvery rainbows of "meteors" flashing through it as it moves in the light! I hand cut this elongated teardrop shaped piece which measures 51x17mm, is 8mm thick with a 2.5mm drill hole and has a weight of 54cts. It has a polished finish all over. The stone is cut so that the orientation of the optical phenomena are at their maximum. Still images don't do this amazing and hard to find gemstone justice. The stone really has to be moved around in the light to get the full optical effects of the aventurescence, chatoyancy, and iris effect that are all present in this remarkable stone!
This material is called "Bloodshot Iolite". It is an odd variety of iolite, a magnesium aluminum silicate, that has inclusions of small flat platelets of reddish hematite or goethite. This creates the optical phenomena of adventurescence throughout the stone. It is the same mineral and optical effect found in feldspars that are sunstones, so this is also accurately referred to as "sunstone in iolite". Iolite is noted for it's pleasing blue color and is often mistaken for sapphire or tanzanite, which are both much more expensive. Most iolite has inclusions and in these stones that I have cut the internal inclusions also create "iris effect" which are little refracted rainbows within the stone. I have never seen ANY of this rough available before my last trip to the World's gem & mineral trade shows in Tucson this last February. I saw ONE dealer who had this rough and I bought his 8 nicest pieces, which yielded only about a dozen pieces and I only have 4 left in my eBay store. That is all I have EVER seen of the rough and if you look around you won't find any other loose beads or custom cut cabs out of this material.

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.