TribeBlog

We just picked up this large piece of rutilated quartz locally – it’s big enough to do up to 3″ plugs from. Slightly smoky with intense rutile on one side fanning into more dispersed but still plainly visible rutile toward the middle. Would make an amazing set of large plugs – I would like to make something between 2″ and 3″ before we cut it down for smaller pieces. It’s rare to find usable rutilated material this large so we’d like to make something equally rare from it. We can probably do Mayan flared pieces, very thick walled tunnels, or solid pieces from it.

These remind be of Ninja Turtles. That’s all I can really say, other than “wow..”

Finished these up today, and words really can’t describe the presence they have. First of all they’re just really big. 2 1/4″ of green fluorite is nothing to snicker about, they weigh a considerable amount and the color saturation due to the size is just unbelievable. The labret is 7/8″ oval, all made from the “Emerald Fluorite” we posted up recently.

I think this was one of the first orders for this material and I’m really glad someone jumped on getting something big made from the slabs before we started cutting them down, as they were begging for it.

The first shot is of everything laying down so you can see how dark the pieces really are. Also, a quarter for scale.

The next shot is of the pieces standing up so you can get an idea of what they look like with light shining through them. Lots going on in these, and there’s actually a geode pocket in the plug on the right full of tiny little quartz crystals.

Last night I was finishing up a bunch of misc. plugs and such, but the highlight of my evening was a BEAUTIFUL 9.2×12mm rutilated quartz labret piece that I had a blast making. Rutilated quartz is one of my personal favorite stones, particularly pieces with very delicate rutile, as with this labret. Design plays a big part in good body jewelry, and with organics it’s no different. I had a variety of rough to choose from with various sizes of rutile needles, some as large as 3mm wide and bright golden color, but I ended up using a piece with the smallest rutile, yet most densely populated rutile field out of the pieces I was considering. It can most properly be appreciated viewed straight on, as it would be while worn.

The customer requested material with gold rutile, and that worked out perfectly as we had beautiful stock to work with. I have enough of the stone left from this piece to make maybe a set of 1″ solid plugs from it if anyone’s interested. It could make several sets of smaller items as well.

I also have some other rutilated quartz in clear and smoky with various colors of rutile, including a smoky to golden quartz with incredibly densely packed silver and red rutile needles. That could make a huge labret or a couple of sets of smaller plugs.

Rutile, for those unaware, is actually thin needles of Titanium Dioxide, which as a point of trivia, has an incredibly high refractive index, which is why it bounces back so much light. Many artists will recognize that mineral name because it’s used in a lot of white paints to achieve an intensely brilliant pure white.

The same customer that got the rutilated piece also got this quite pretty rose quartz piece in a slightly smaller oval size, to aid in stretching up to the rutile piece I assume.

We’ve never made a rose quartz lip piece before, just because no one had ever asked for one, but I’m totally down with making more of ‘em now because it’s very nice. And honestly, I think a piece of pink stone in your face is just sweet. This is a material we can of course make plugs from as well, and the thicker/larger the material is, the more dense and full the pink color will appear.

I just wanted to briefly mention that we’ve added a new section to the site: Labret/Lip Plugs. This section is dedicated to round and oval pieces for Philitrum (upper lip) and Labret (lower lip) piercing jewelry. Right now you’ll find amber, amazonite and two kinds of obsidian, including rainbow. As I get time to make more samples I’ll add more materials, but you’re welcome to request just about anything.

I really enjoy doing hand carved stone pieces so I wanted to showcase two pieces that left our workshop recently. The first is an oval labret made from red Tiger’s Eye carved with a simple concave four petal flower motif, inlaid with a tiny piece of green malachite. I was running out of daylight working this outside the other day so I snapped this in-process shot before I packed everything up.

The second piece was finished up earlier today – a black jadeite 2g ‘flared’ septum pincher with a really nice shape to it. About 7/8″ across, 5/8″ tall. The customer had a metal piece with similar shape but wanted a piece made from a natural material and he wanted it to be black, so this is what he ended up with!

A while back we posted a photo of some really beautiful rainbow obsidian rough. We’ve made a few small sets from it and I just wanted to post some photos of those to give an example of what the stuff looks like. It is FULL of color with all sorts of shades of green and purple – colors very common to rainbow obsidian, but also beige, teal and even true blue. It is challenging to bring out the color on the faces of small items (all of this rough is quite small – largest we could get would probably be 5/8″ unless you want cabs for setting in something else) but it has been going quite well and we’ve really managed to bring out some lush detail in very small surface area.

This material is notoriously hard to photograph, but you can plainly see both purple and a true blue in the left set. These were 00g pieces with a slight Mayan flare and rounded faces to make the most of the color. The right set is showing several neutral tones of brown, gold and gray along with some hints of green. That set is 2g with a standard flare. So as you can see we’re really able to bring out a decent amount of color even with the smaller sizing.

We even have a couple of pieces that exhibit a true rainbow effect – layered banding of solid, distinctly different colors side by side. I’ll have to get a photo of that soon, it’s a beautiful thing to see.

Items we can make from Rainbow Obsidian: smaller standard plugs, small mayan flared pieces, cartilage jewelry (single flared for conch, flats/upper), labrets (we can do these quite large, especially ovals, as many pieces are larger but long and not suitable for plugs).

We’ve had these two stones sitting on the shelf in the lapidary bay for a year and they were quite large and ugly but we could see goodness peeking out from one of the corners. We finally decided to bust into them (literally) and found some gorgeous goodness indeed. I spent the evening slabbing them. Deep, DEEP saturated green color with hints of blue and some nice white veins throughout. The beginnings of some tiny geode formations here and there. Beautiful stone.

It is currently available for custom requests. Really small stuff is a no-go from this, we’d like to go no lower than 00g, but we can pull up to 2.5″ with no foreseeable problems (and we’d certainly love to make some amazing large jewelry). Please email us or call if you’re interested.