TribeBlog

Been super busy this week making custom work every day. Mostly stone stuff. We’ve got a few really amazing projects in the works for multi-material items with stones set in bezels in other materials. I’m really excited about several of them.

Been making a ton of obsidian items this week, and plenty more to do tomorrow as well. Here are a few examples. The first is a really beautiful set of rainbow obsidian pieces in 9mm. They have a wonderful green and purple flash. Don’t mind the stone dust!

Next up a couple of larger sets.. some 5/8″ pieces with a slightly larger than usual front flare and domed face. These pieces were made on the spot while the customer, a regular at our studio, hung out and watched.

A larger set at 1 5/16″ with some beautiful gold sheen hiding in the faces.

I squeezed some amber in today, one piece in particular I was pretty stoked on simple because it’s something we don’t do often. 2g Chiapas amber septum tusk, 1.5″ in length.

The second amber set is TINY. 6g Mayan flared amber plugs! Beautiful swirly red details in otherwise clean and clear pieces.

I managed to squeeze out two sets of the beautiful green fluorite over the past few days. The first set shown is a custom order, and the second set is available. Both are 1″.

If you are interested in the set below (1″/ 25.4mm) please shoot us an email.

Last up I’ve got a really beautiful lip piece in 9mm x 24mm size from a jade we don’t let go of often. The ’sapphire’ blue Guatemalan jadeite from the Motagua river valley. This material is a beautiful blue-green color with marvelous translucency. To give you an idea of how tough jadeite really is, I cut and polished a 1mm thick slice off the back of this lip piece while I was making it. I also took a macro photo of the slice so you can see what the crystal structure and color of a material like this looks like.

You can see in the macro shot that the jadeite is primarily white to clear with tiny specks of blue and green, which are other mineral inclusions. Jadeite in it’s pure form is colorless and it’s the included mineral compounds which create the color. At this thickness it’s so translucent you can read the newspaper through it. There are not many other stones that you could hand work to this extent and still have one piece and not tiny fragments.

That’s all I got for ya right now in terms of the daily dose of eyecandy. There’ll be more soon. In the mean time, enjoy

Hope everyone’s had a great week, wherever you happen to be. It’s been incredibly warm in here in Richmond this week, with transient thunderstorms dancing all around us. I spent the week outside working stone on the patio near our street entrance. Below are a couple of nifty notables from this week’s efforts.

1 1/8″ Labradorite Plugs with some really gorgeous character and “grain” in the stone, in addition to the marvelous flash.

10mm Mayan flared Chiapas amber plugs with some really pretty red hued “ghost” filaments and interesting texture within, while being primarily clear.

A great little suite of jewelry that proves small can be exciting. 4g Rainbow Obsidian single flared pieces with green flash, and 4g Labradorite with blue flash and some really striking sparkle within the stone.

And to round things out, a 5/8″ round included amber labret with just a lush amount of texture to it. This piece will likely shine deep green in the sun when worn.

If you’re in Richmond, Virginia please stop by Onetribe this evening as we participate in the Manchester district 4th Friday art walk from 7pm – 10pm at 403 Stockton St. We will be showing work from local photographers and a jeweler/metalsmith for the evening, and will be serving light edibles and cold drinkables.

Have a great weekend everyone!

This list went out with the newsletter but I’m providing it here for anyone to run across on the website. These are the materials that we currently have on hand here in the studio for the production of custom orders. They range in size and the amount we have on hand – from one piece that may weigh a few ounces to 40+lbs of some.

• Rhodonite (pink & black)
• Mahogany Obsidian (brown & black)
• Silver Sheen Obsidian (silver banding & sheen in black)
• Snowflake Obsidian (white “snowflakes” on black)
• Rainbow Obsidian (purples, greens, blues, tans in banding show under ideal lighting conditions)
• Jet (Lignite – It’s where the term “jet black” comes from)
• Dumorturite (sort of a denim blue)
• Sodalite (very blue with white & black veins)
• Quartz (clear)
• Rutilated Quartz (clear with rutile needles)
• Smoky Rutilated Quartz (brown hued quartz with golden rutile needles)
• Smoky Quartz (near black when no light’s shining through, many interesting “bubbles” and inclusions but very clean)
• Gold Tiger’s Eye (Gold with hematite banding and chatoyant flash)
• Blue Tiger’s Eye (Blue with hematite banding and chatoyant flash)
• Rose Quartz (light pink to lavender hued)
• Amazonite (vivid blue-green, some of the best we’ve ever seen)
• Labradorite (A Grade is way flashy in golds, reds, blues, teals / B Grade is dark gray to black with small specks of flash to no flash.. basically cutoffs from the good stuff)
• Larimar (beautiful light blue & white, Caribbean origin, rather rare)
• Petrified Wood (all sorts of colors, lots of mixed neutrals)
• Banded Agate (cremes, grays, light blues)
• Dendritic Agate (some small black organic looking inclusions, mostly interesting banding and high translucency, gray/blue with some reds)
• Ivoryite (pure white stone, no inclusions – great white & vegan option)
• Morado Agate (orbicular reds and purples)
• Red Breciated Jasper (deep brick red with white and clear inclusion)
• Royal Imperial Jasper (small plugs, labrets – pastel cremes in orb pattern)
• Mexican Crazy Lace Agate (reds, grays and whites in bent banded pattern)
• Gemmy Green Jades (fairly translucent solid bright green color)
• Jadeite & Tourmaline (darker olive-drab green with tiny black tourmaline crystals)
• Rare Blue Jades (way pricey, way rare, way worth it)
• Black Jadeite (very heavy, very dark)
• Chiapas Ambers (mostly green hue and clear or with inclusions)

This list does not include things that we can very easily order from our rough stone suppliers, so if you are ever interested in something specific, let us know and we will find it. That list includes other obsidians (like spiderweb obsidian), fluorites of all colors, charoite, pietersite, lapis (old stock), etc. Basically any stone from just about anywhere that is legal and/or ethical.

Items we can make from stone with reasonably fast turnaround:

• Double Flared Plugs
• Single Flared Plugs
• Non-Flared Plugs
• Teardrop Plugs
• Concaves (subject to stone’s characteristics)
• Mayan Flared Plugs (subject to stone’s characteristics)
• Mayan Flared Tunnels (subject to stone’s characteristics)
• Pinchers/Crescents
• Stone Weights (simple shapes, 2D planes)
• Stone in stone inlays (yeah, we can do that)

Items we can make from stone that take us a really long time

• Spirals (subject to stone’s characteristics)
• Rings (subject to stone’s characteristics)
• Carved Items (carved hanging styles, etc)
• Stone Weights (3d items like coils and complex shapes like pear weights)

If you have any ideas for any of these materials, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We keep a running custom order queue and materials wait list that ranges in length, depending on the complexity of the item and rarity of the material, from a couple of days to a couple of months. Quality custom made jewelry created to your specifications isn’t something that happens overnight, but it is definitely something special worth waiting for.

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.