Some More Sonora Sunrise!

Hi Folks! Thanks for all the lovely comments! I haven't really been so excited about any particular stone like this in a long time! I've heard so much about Pantone declaring Turquoise to be the color of the year, and I was disappointed that I didn't get much turquoise rough when I was in Tucson this year, but the Sonora Sunrise is really making up for it! The rich turquoise color of the chrysocolla-brochantite is so stunning next to the brilliant brick red orange of the cuprite! What I really like is that the colors almost seem SUPERnatural, and yet this material is totally natural and untreated! 90% of the turquoise out there is stabilized or treated in some way, so to find such a dramatically beautiful gemstone material as this, that has natural colors and is strong enough to not need any kind of treatment, is really a special find!

I have used most of the rest of the 4 pound chunk that I've been working on making these larger beads, but I have been successful in finding a good source to get additional rough, so I JUST bought another 14 pounds of this phenomenal rough and I promise that I will also make some smaller bead pendants and some cabs that are less expensive.

I REALLY like this piece that I sold this week to a collector and jewelry designer in Scotland. It's a large tongue shape to be set in jewelry (no holes)

and I'm quite fond of this little inverted kite shaped pendant bead that is in my eBay store...

Once I get the extra rough I'll cut up some cabochons and share pics of those! I do have a few cabs in the store and trust me, with 14 pounds of this juicy stuff on the way, I promise there will be more. Here's one of the cabs that is already up, a high dome teardrop and sometimes the cuprite has some wonderful smaller patterns within the rich orange red color, as this teardrop bead shows..

I'm geeked about cutting more of this stuff! Thanks for letting me share with y'all!

"Sonora Sunrise" Chrysocolla & Cuprite

I made these wonderful bead pendants and cabochons using a beautiful and striking stone called "Sonora Sunrise" that has only been on the market since around 2007. It is a mixture of wonderful turquoise colored, sky blue chrysocolla, firey orange-red cuprite, with black veins of tenorite. There are sometimes little dots of green that I believe to be brochantite and one dealer seems to claim that the massive blue is colored by brochantite. Chrysocolla can form after brochantite. They are ALL copper minerals, so who know's how God/dess's spun them together at their moment of creation! The result is totally natural and super striking. Mined in Sonora, Mexico. I've never seen anyone else cut beads out of this stuff! Compare with other pieces on eBay and the internet and you'll see that DVHdesigns cut Sonora Sunrise stands out from the rest! Chrysocolla is often mistaken for a kind of turquoise. They are both secondary minerals that form after copper in various ways.

Here's a close up of one of the stones, a large shield shaped focal bead that's currently in my eBay store...

Here's some information on the chrysocolla part of the stone that I easily found on the internet....
"Chrysocolla (hydrated copper silicate) is a mineral, (Cu,Al)2H2Si2O5(OH)4·nH2O. It is of secondary origin and forms in the oxidation zones of copper ore bodies. Associated minerals are quartz, limonite, azurite, malachite, cuprite, and other secondary copper minerals.....Chrysocolla has an attractive blue-green colour and is a minor ore of copper, having a hardness of 2.5 to 3.5. It is also used as an ornamental stone. It is typically found as glassy botryoidal or rounded masses and crusts, or vein fillings. Because of its light color, it is sometimes confused with turquoise. Commonly it occurs only as pourous crusts unsuitable for gem use, but high quality, gem grade chrysocolla can be translucent and is highly prized.....The name comes from the Greek chrysos, "gold", and kolla, "glue", in allusion to the name of the material used to solder gold, and was first used by Theophrastus in 315 BCE." For metaphysical information on Chrysocolla, I have found this website for Shimmerlings to be a good resource, with a variety of information and the sources cited.

Here's some information on the cuprite part that I also found online about cuprite... "Cuprite is an oxide mineral composed of copper(I) oxide Cu2O, and is a minor ore of copper.....It is a secondary mineral which forms in the oxidized zone of copper sulfide deposits. It frequently occurs in association with native copper, azurite, chrysocolla, malachite, tenorite and a variety of iron oxide minerals. It is known as ruby copper due to its distinctive red color....Cuprite was first described in 1845 and the name derives from the Latin cuprum for its copper content." Metaphysically Cuprite is said to "stimulate the base chakra while providing a grounding affect on the whole body. It can increase physical vitality and energy. It is a survival tool, attracting that which can satisfy ones physical needs...also used to alleviate worry..."

The black tenorite is also a copper oxide mineral and has it's own metaphysical properties, but I'll let you research that one yourself!

Here's a pic of the rest of the rough I have and that I'm getting ready to cut. This is all the rough I have at the moment, although I hope to get some more. When I was in Tucson at the gem shows I searched through over 500 pounds of this rough to hand pick out one 4 pound chunk to work with! For the sake of scale, that dirty black nob on the right is about the size of a silver dollar. I hope to get a bunch more of this cut and listed over the next few days...

Thanks for checking out my newest offerings!

Mens Jewelry, stuff you make for the guys!

Hey Folks! On another jewelry forum that I'm on someone started a thread for folks to share and discuss jewelry designed for men or jewelry that has a more masculine look. I thought it would be an interesting thread to start and share with here as well. I'd love to see pieces that folks have made just for a man or that they feel men would be comfortable wearing. Also, is there anyone out there who makes jewelry JUST for men or has a significant percentage of their buyers who are men? Love to hear your feedback as well.

I must confess that amongst, shall I say, "MY people", we are not so prone to assigning a gender to our jewelry. I certainly understand the dominant gender paradigms in jewelry and fashion design but I have always been a strong advocate of subverting the dominant paradigm! That being said, most men, myself included, DO hue to more traditional norms when it comes to ornament. For example, I DO own a very nice, high quality, rhinestone tiara, but I seldom wear it out in public. I mostly wear focal beads that I make myself and I think my work is very elemental and gender neutral.

It's interesting how social norms have changed around men and jewelry, just in my lifetime. In the 60's & 70's it was ok and popular for younger men to wear chains and beads, but any ear piercing was still seen as pretty gay, and most men older than 30 seemed to be more conservative, sticking to strickly "manly" rings (wedding band, class ring, military, signet rings) and tie bars or tie tacs. Men of my father's age and certain geographic locales might wear a bolo tie.

To me, it seemed by the 1980's men's jewelry had practically gone underground, except for the men's "Single Earring". During the 80's and the Mtv generation a lot of guys started to wear a single earring in their LEFT ear. During this time period the fashion phrase for a man who wanted to get his ear pierced was "LEFT IS RIGHT AND RIGHT IS WRONG." According to this credo, a man with his left ear pierced was a heterosexual (or closeted) and a man with only his right ear pierced was a homosexual. A guy could get multiple piercings in his left ear, but if he went to the right side people got even more suspicious. I got my left ear pierced in the 80's and suffered a lot of homophobic slurs even though I had pierced the "Straight guy" ear. In the late 80's I came out of the closet and got my other ear pierced and started wearing matched pairs of surgical steel big hoop earrings. For me it was a political act as much as a fashion statement.

By the 90's it was ok for straight guys to get both ears pierced and then EVERYBODY started piercing EVERYTHING! The piercing craze certainly has done a LOT to increase the number of all kinds of men wearing jewelry, or at least men wearing piercing jewelry. I think it's interesting that so much of what is accepted as fashionable amongst "men's jewelry" is the sort of "Modern Primitive" look that accompanies piercing jewelry. I mean, here in Portland, Oregon where I live there are LOTS of mostly straight men who have LOTS of piercing jewelry, plugs, and stretched ear lobes. However when I'm in Tucson at the big trade shows for the jewelry industry, it becomes clear that jewelry for men is an extremely teeny tiny portion of the jewelry trade.

All in all I would just like to see more men being more comfortable wearing more jewelry to accessorize themselves. Heck, since we're so firnly in the age of cell phones many men have even stopped wearing a wrist watch, which for most of the 20th century was the epitome of men's jewelry fashion. Anyhow, enough of my babbling on. I'll share a couple of pics of my beads that I think ANY man would feel comfortable wearing as a traditionally masculine look.

When men wear necklaces they're much more likely to wear a single pendant on a chain than they are to wear something with multiply strung beads and that pendant is more apt to be a straightforward design or linear shape as opposed to something too curvy and patterned. Also, most men can't wear as short of a chain as a woman can wear (chokers interfere with adams apples) and I don't think a really LONG necklace works out to be very masculine either. Personally I think 18 to 24" is the ideal length for a man's necklace with the length depending on the shirt he's wearing!

I make a lot of my beads in a classical "shield" shape which I think lends itself to masculine imagery. This shield shaped bead is made out of a high grade copper ore from the Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan's UP. It's dark with dark green epidote inclusions and splotches of shiny pure copper....

while this rare Tanzanian Iolite Sunstone bead does have sparkles in it, the watery blue color, the internal fractures, and the linear, curved rectangular shape give it a masculine edge and it would look nice alone on a chain.

Another shape that I do that I think reads well as a more "masculine" shaped pendant shape is what I call a "Wedge Shape". This wedge shaped bead is made out of rare 250 million year old petrified tree fern from Brazil...

That's it for now! I look forward to seeing more jewelry stuff for the GUYS!

Keweenaw Copper Ore Beads

Hi all, when I was in Tucson and Quartzite last month at the big gem & mineral shows I picked up a nice variety of Michigan Keweenaw copper ores! I love the diversity of the ways that the ore forms. The patterns and matrix colors are so unique, and the copper has such a powerful, energetic, and elemental feel to it. I only got a few pieces, most about the size of a lemon, but each one has very different patterns and matrix. Each stone will only yield a few bead sized pieces, and drilling through the solid copper bits is hard. This copper is up to 5% silver and that little extra silver makes this copper more conductive than your average copper. It;'s Keweenaw copper that was used to make the US TELEGRAPH system in the 19th century, and then the TELEPHONE and ELECTRIC MOTOR industry in this country! While Keweenaw had the purest copper deposits in the world, they weren't the biggest and most of the mines were closed by the late 1960's. This copper tells a story...

These two pieces show copper that seems to have crystallized in place. While there are some blobs, there is also a latticelike pattern in the copper. I believe that the green matrix may be epidote. Only got these two beads out of this piece of rough...

Then there's another piece that has lots of spots in the dark matrix, with globs of copper. It's hard to capture the reflections off the copper in the photo, but they are spread throughout the stone...

and this piece has a nice little vein clearly running through it....

Thanks for letting me share. Back to the wheels, I'm finishing up some Mexican Fire Agate beads....

Turquoise Hearts!!!

Hi Folks! I'm still having my heART attack. I just made these three hearts out of turquoise. This smaller one is mostly nuggety and natural that is just buffed up. I worked with the natural shape and smoothed out the lobes....
































This second one is symmetrical and polished all around. Also with a 3mm drill hole...































This large one is left sort of "nuggety" on parts and smooth and polished over the rest of it. 3mm drill hole through the lobe....




























































Turquoise is easy to polish. Nuggets can just be lightly tumbled in 600 grit overnight and then buffed with a muslin buff using Zam or Fabulustre, which will take it to a high polish.
When I was in Tucson at the big Gem & Mineral shows in February of 2010 I picked up a nice little batch of some turquoise to work with! This material is real turquoise from China that has been stabilized, which means that it has been hardened with a clear plastic resin that does not change the color. Most people don't know that about 90% of the turqoise mined in the world is a kind of turquoise "chalk" and the vast majority of that material HAS to be stabilized or treated in some way so that it can be worked into jewelry or beads. Natural turquoise that has not been treated and is stable enough to cut is rather rare and quite expensive. Untreated turquoise can absorb a person's body oils and turn green over time. Even an accomplished lapidary can't necessarily tell natural turquoise from treated turquoise once it's cut.

Turquoise has been one of the most popular gemstones throughout history, prized by every culture from the Egyptians (who made faience as a kind of imitation turquoise), to the Persians, to the Tibetans, to the Native Americans. The color experts at Pantone, have declared Turquoise to be the Color of the Year for 2010! Check them out for more info on the use of the color turquoise in fashion and design this year!

Here are the classifications of different kinds of turquoise. Natural: is material that can be cut and polished with no treatment. Stabilized: is material that has been hardened with a clear plastic that has not altered the color. Treated: is turquoise that has been hardened with resin that has been color dyed. Reconstructed: turquoise had had it's shape altered such as being ground up and pressed into a shape using resins and dyes. Imitation: is manmade (such as plastic) or natural product (such as howlite or magnesite) that has been made to imitate natural turquoise.

Thanks for looking and I'm currently working on hearts in kona dolomite, pyrite, dino bone, and serpentine...

Regards, David @DVHdesigns