"Sonora Sunrise" Chrysocolla & Cuprite 2011

Hey Folks! A little over a year ago I ran a thread with images of work I did out of Sonora Sunrise and I included a picture of the one, four pound chunk of rough I had got in Tucson along with some images of the beads and cabs I cut from that rough. This year I scoured Quartzsite and Tucson for more of this beautiful rough! There wasn't much rough to be had and prices had increased a lot since last year. The one dealer I saw who had any quantity of decent quality rough, maybe a few hundred pounds, was asking 400% more than I had paid for that same quality last year. I ended up getting one decent 6 pound piece of rough from a dealer in Quartzsite and two small, top notch, AAA+ quality pieces that weighed about 2 pounds each, that I got from yet another dealer in Tucson. Less than 10 pounds total and a significant percentage of that gets ground into dust during sawing and shaping!

Sonora Sunrise is a completely natural mixture of chrysocolla (the turquoise colored part) and cuprite (the orange part) and tenorite (the black part) and sometimes brochantite (green specks). They're all copper minerals. It's from Mexico and has only been available in the lapidary world for 4 or 5 years. Very little is available and it is highly doubtful Here's a pic of the rough....

I really, REALLY, LOVE this stuff and wish there was more of it! I've already cut up about half of this stash. From the small piece on the left, which has the wonderful banding of blue-white, blue, black, orange, black, and blue! This is probably some of the BEST material I've ever seen in this and I've already taken steps to keep two of the stones I made out of this for myself (last years piece was as good or better and I did NOT save one for myself!)

and here are some pieces I made out of the "blue white" part of the chrysocolla, along with a natural edged "tornado" shaped cab I made, and the little orange pointed teardrop is made from the other piece of top quality rough (the small piece on the right of the pic of rough).... In this next pic, the top row is made from the piece of the rough on the right as well. I consider this top notch, AAA+ material as well. The bottom row is all made from the large chunk in the middle of the picture. I really love the subtler, more variegated and muted colors and patterns of turquoise and orange found in the larger chunk of rough and it actually takes a little better polish than the more vivid quality colored rough. IF I had never been exposed to the AAA rough, I would still be absolutely ga-ga over the rough from the middle piece of rough! All this material came from the same mine.

The larger chunk has the cuprite only running across the top edge of the rough. You can see in the 3rd and 6th beads in the bottom row that I left the top of the bead with the natural surface of the stone. So on that larger piece there was a significant piece that was mostly chrysocolla with the turquoise blue grey coloring but it has a VERY cool vein of hematite-iron oxide that runs through it and in some places that vein turns to orange cuprite. I'm enjoying just playing with the bisecting pattern of that vein as well! If one can have a love affair with a kind of rock, that's what I'm having with this stone!

FYI, a little education about the nomenclature of this stone and some caveat emptor if you're buying "Sonora Sunrise". The name is a "trade name" for this particular combination of chrysocolla and cuprite from Sonora, Mexico. It has also been co-opted by Chinese dealers for fake gemstones. I just did a search on eBay and there are only 400 items that come up with a search for "sonora sunrise". Out of those 400 items, 288 are "sonora sunrise jasper" pendants or cabs and every SINGLE ONE is a dyed, unnatural color, sold by Hong Kong dealers, and is NOT sonora sunrise at all! Sonora Sunrise is NOT a jasper anyway. Interestingly, if you do an advanced search for "sonora sunrise -jasper" out of the 112 responses one gets, nearly every one IS genuine Sonora Sunrise Chrysocolla and is sold by an American Lapidary. Just doing my bit to educate the beaders and jewelers of the world about real and unique semi-precious gemstones!

Thanks for letting me share my work and my stone geek knowledge!

New work in genuine jet, mourning jewelry, a new story...

Good Mourning Folks,

It's been quite awhile since I wrote about my work with jet and making mourning jewelry. If you check my old thread you can see all the information that I've posted before. I'm still working quite a bit of jet and I gave a lecture last month for the Portland Bead Society about the history of jet and my work with jet. It went over really well and I'm tentatively schedule to give the jet lecture again for the San Diego Bead Society in January of next year!

I learned even more about jet while preparing for my powerpoint lecture for PBS. Most people are familiar with jet's historic uses in Victorian times as traditional mourning jewelry to help women deal with their bereavement, and as one of the only true, naturally black, organic accessories available to go with a widow's weeds. Dealing with my own grief from loss of family and the ravages of surviving 30 years of the AIDS epidemic is one of the things that has pushed me, and keeps pushing me, to work with this unusual organic gemstone. Of course a lot of people think that because jet is black and it was used in Victorian mourning jewelry that it has ALWAYS been associated with death. I was happy to discover that is just not true!

In my research I found out that the cult of the Phrygian Earth goddess Cybele, the "Great Mother" of the ancient gods and goddesses, has an association with jet! Her cult spread from northern Turkey to Greece and then throughout the Roman empire. She was known as the "black stone", or the black faced goddess, because the most famous statue of her had a black meteorite for it's face! (unknown whether it was just a rough black meteorite or if it naturally formed to look like a face or if it had been sculpted to look like a face). To honor her, the priests in her cult wore jet beads! Here's a link to an article in the BBC about the archeological dig where they found this Roman transvestite eunuch priest decked out in jet beads! I still haven't been able to find pictures of THOSE actual beads, in spite of having directly contacted the guy who did this dig.

So I continue to work in jet and explore it's deep history. The earliest jet beads discovered were in an archeological dig in northern Spain and date from 17,000 BCE!. Here's some pics of my current work in jet....

Most everything I take to a high polish but some of them I've been leaving matte finish. My friend in Scotland and I have been collaborating more and here are some necklaces she's strung with some of my jet focal beads... This one has what I call "ash blonde" tigereye beads in it (like much tigereye, I imagine these were color treated with heat or bleaching)

and here are two more necklaces made with jet focals and white magnesite beads. I suspect that the white magnesite, which was sold as "white turquoise" (NO such thing), is reconstituted (certainly the spikes are) but it definitely goes well with the jet focals and jet spacers!

That's all for now! I just wanted to get "back in black" and tell y'all a NEW story about the history of jet! Thanks for letting me share and feel free to check out my DVHdesigns eBay store if you would like to see more of my work!

The Goddess Opal & the Virgin Yowah Nut Opal

Hey folks! Haven't blogged for a long time now it seems, but I've got some help now in the studio with my photography and eBay listing so I'm getting lots more cut and will hopefully have more time to share images of my work and my thoughts on gems and stones.

This is my current favorite new stone! I call it my "Goddess Opal".

I hand cut and polished this piece out of a rare and unusual piece of rough. It is a conglomerate, or cluster, of little pieces of genuine Lightning Ridge Black Opal still in the soft, sandy matrix in which it is found in the mines in Australia. I got this ONE chunk of rough and rather than cut it up into a half dozen very small cabs I decided to work with it as is, including the matrix as a part of the pendant, and I am thrilled with the result! This piece feels very "Goddess/ss'ssssyyyyy" to me and has since I started cutting it. It feels electric and organic, watery and hard, like it could be found at the bottom of the sea or in the desert at the end of a lightning bolt.... I wore this to Faerie Coffee here in Portland, Oregon today and someone said "Holy Cow! What's THAT! It looks like an electric Venus of Willendorf.

The total weight on this piece is 218 cts, including the matrix. There are 8 protrusions of solid opal that shows beautiful, electric purple color and fire. There are 3 more protusions of solid opal that are also lovely but don't show any fire, just clear or cloudy opal. The entire piece measures 60x36x26mm and there is a 3mm drill hole through the matrix. I hand sanded all the opal surfaces. To help strengthen the matrix I applied a thin layer of a cyanoacrylate stabilizing agent which just barely soaked into the soft matrix and allowed me to put a minor polish on the rock like muddy matrix that these opals occur in. The whole piece was tumbled for a few hours in a gentle tumbler with a 600 grit abrasive to both strength test it and to put a soft organic, uniform feel to the whole shape after my initial sanding of the black opal surfaces. I then hand polished all the opal surfaces and put a buff polish on the surface of the matrix.

This amazing stone looks like some wierd combination of jelly fish and fungus with a purple bioluminscent glow. It evokes a flowery form and has been stopping people in their tracks when I wear it! Here's another view of the same stone....

Here's another stone that is also an opal, and also from Australia, and also makes me think "Goddess" but it couldn't be more different!

I hand cut and polished this piece out of a rare and unusual piece of rough. It is from a stone nodule called a Yowah Nut, which is a concretion of opal and ironstone in matrix. Found in the mines of Queensland, Australia. I got this ONE chunk of rough and I wasn't too impressed because I could tell that the opal in this piece was just transparent honey colored, with no fire or play of color. I liked the patterns though and decided to cut it into an amulet. It wasn't until I was doing the final polishing on it that I saw the FIGURE coming out of the cave in the center of the stone!!!! This piece feels very "God/dess/ss'ssssyyyyy" to me and has since I started cutting it. I don't know if it's Mary, Guadalupe, Jesus, or some prophet coming out of that dark brown cave surrounded by honey colored opal, but it has blown my mind and surprised everyone I've shown it to! I see a cloaked figure, hands folded, with a tiny little cross above their head. It also looks like the figure is emanating from the small dark brown pillar at the base, almost like a Genie from a bottle. What do you see? How does this stone speak to you?

The total weight on this piece is 130 cts. The entire piece measures 53x40x8mm and there is a 4mm drill hole through the matrix on the top of the face. I hand polished all the opal surfaces and put a buff polish on the surface of the matrix which were too soft to take a high polish. Here's another image of the cloaked figure emerging from the cave, with a little more detail....

That's it for now! I'm cutting lots more stuff in all different kinds of materials, so I hope folks will check out my work!