TribeBlog

We had incredible success with the Amazonite material that we sourced from a local mine in 2009 so we decided to ring them up and go out there again in January. Here’s a snapshot of some of last year’s material:

For more information on our previous trip and more photos of the mine grounds and such check out last year’s trip post: Onetribe Goes Mining! We didn’t document quite as much this year as we’d already visited previously and both us and the mine owner had schedules to keep.

Amazonite is a microcline feldspar with an incredible blue-green color that occurs a few places in the world, and one of those places is about 40 minutes from our Onetribe HQ here in Richmond, Virginia. Amazonite, depending on the quality, can vary from a mostly white to sea foam green color to a very deep, semi-translucent green-blue color unlike any other stone. For a while we had been working material from Brazil and by pure chance stumbled upon the local source, which conveniently happens to be hands down the nicest material we have ever seen. We started working the local material in early 2009 and received immense response from customers for standard plugs and custom orders, some involving gem grade semi-translucent material that is very rare.

The mine owner was happy to oblige and we made an appointment to show up on a Friday afternoon. Since we last visited we’ve hired one new employee and had another that didn’t go out last year so we decided to close up shop early and make it a company field trip. We had a ton of fun, as we often do at work.

The mine is a very small operation, family owned and mostly geared toward school field trips coming out and panning for Amazonite, small garnets, non-gem quality topaz, mica, quartz and other stones that occur here in Virginia. It’s a very basic setup with zero automation, minimal machinery, and lots of manual labor to get the material out of the ground. Walking around the grounds you really get a feel that this is not a fancy place, but rather a small scale labor of love for the owner, who has a background in much larger geology and mining operations.

There are large pieces of material of varying quality sitting around on the ground, and one of the neat things about visiting is that the ground is literally splashed with incredible color as Amazonite is very fragile and easily fractures into small pieces, which litter the ground like tiny bits of semi-precious trash.

When we visited last time we were told that there was some really nice material down in the walls that they’d yet to bring up to the surface. This past autumn they finally had a chance to get in there and do it, and the material got stored away unsearched until we got our grubby little jewelry making stone geek hands on it.

In 2009 it was bitterly cold but we roughed it for the sake of sweet rocks. This time not only was it bitterly cold, but it was raining so basically it was miserable. But we did it for you guys! Okay, a little for us too, we do heart sweet rocks.

We take a lot of pride in going through the effort to hand pick most of the materials we use for our jewelry. One stone at a time, from tiny slivers barely large enough for 6mm cabochons to pieces large enough for jewelry several inches in size, we spent the next couple of hours sorting for best color and quality and speaking with the mine owner about our selections.

I have no idea what the hell I was doing, but it was funny and I think Marshall, our wood turner and dedicated mine documentarian (and only other full time staff member in our Virginia studio not in these photos – we’s small!) was laughing so hard the shot got all crazy. I was obviously proud of “deez rocks!”

We walked out with nearly 100lbs of material, and I just took about half of that down to our second workshop in Indonesia for production runs of plugs, teardrops and some septum spikes that will be done a little later this spring. We also set aside some of the nicest material – deepest color and saturation and most translucent, for a run of very high quality cabochons for bezel setting, and of course there’s plenty on hand here at the Richmond workshop for custom work.

Expect some beautiful things to be available from this wonderful material this spring!

We’ve been crazy busy working on producing and shipping jewelry daily. I (Jared) am working on trying to finish as much custom work as possible before we close on the 23rd for our annual break. Here are a couple of projects that were finished and promptly shipped thus far this week.

First we’ve got a really rad set of stone thin tunnels. One is 1 3/4″ and the other is 2″ – wall thickness for both is about 3.5mm which makes them very fragile. Thinking forward to storage I decided it would be nice both aesthetically and for practical reasons if they nested inside one another, so that’s what happened. This is Guatemalan jadeite with tourmaline inclusions.

Next up we’ve got a beautiful 0g set of Mayan flared square faced (a traditional Pre-Hispanic design, although somewhat rare) plugs made from Guatemalan black jadeite with Chiapas amber inlays set in silver. This is stone set in silver, set in stone with no adhesives, 100% hardware attachment. We don’t get to make many square faced pieces so these were a treat and we appreciate being asked to do them!

Lastly here’s a set of Mayan flared ebony plugs with Peruvian turquoise in silver. The stone was provided by a customer that obtained it in Peru during her travels. We had already created a few sets of solid stone plugs for her from it but she wanted a mixed media piece as well, so we created cabochons from the material and made these for her.

Time to go home and wash off the stone/wood/grass/silver/copper/amber/glass dust (seriously, we worked in all of those materials today!) and rest for the evening so we can come back and do it tomorrow!

We just finished up this beautiful little set of our signature Maya flower style in bloodwood with rutilated quartz cabochons hardware set (no adhesives) into copper. I love the overall look of these pieces. Please pardon the dirty details, I always get excited and photograph pieces and the macro lens pulls out all of the detailing I need to do prior to shipment. But you get the idea

The other super rad (at least I think so) set of custom jewelry to come out of the workshop recently was this set of rough faced amethyst stone plugs. Slightly larger faces to try and showcase more texture, the saddles of these pieces are ground from the base crystal matrix of the amethyst while the face exhibits the traditional rough crystalline structure.

Quite a few super nice pieces have gone out over the past couple of weeks. Here are some highlights:

0g Mayan Flared Rutilated Quartz with very slight concave faces.

1″ Rutilated Quartz Teardrops

This was a sample custom set for a group of ammolite cabochons in ovals and round we had produced by a mine that specializes in ammolite material. We’ll post up photos of the rest of the batch when they arrive. Gorgeous vibrant colors. We’ll be setting them into plugs and I may do a few very custom round and oval stone labrets with ammolite set into the ends.

0g Mayan Flared Bloodstone Plugs, beautiful contrast of red and green on these faces.

Another signature set of Onetribe raw crystal structure outlays. These are French Boxwood and contain “flower amethyst” – very light lilac colored tiny crystals. Wonderful colors here.

1.5″ Emerald Fluorite Teardrops

1.25″ Green and Yellow Fluorite plugs, amazing color contrast. Yellow fluorite isn’t particularly common and I hadn’t ever seen it this bold in color and large enough to be workable, but we had a small stone of green fluorite bordered with this yellow. The white stripe is agate.

Hope you dig the eye candy, have a great weekend everyone!

We’ve been hard at work making great stuff for beautiful people. Here are a couple of recent examples. The first is two beautiful sets of 2g plugs with large faces, one in Chiapas amber and the other in our new silver sheen obsidian material.

Next up is a really nice, quite large (1″) oval Amazonite labret from our local Virginia mine material.

Next we’ve got a 0g set of Amazonite plugs from some of the nicest material we have – very saturated color!

Below we’ve got an amber septum spike with some very pretty green sheen, and also a rare crystal clear section right at the tip.

Next up is a marvelous oval rainbow obsidian labret – very subtle – at any angle other than the one shown in the photo, it appears nearly black, but move it to this position and it explodes with color.

A set of wonderful blue tiger’s eye pieces with some gorgeous ‘brushstroke’ effect with the yellow.

Small ebony blocky Mayan flowers with Lapis cabochons set in silver. Love these!

A kit of wood jewelry for our friends at Ninjaflower in New Zealand. Maple teardrops, some olivewood pieces and some katalox with narra inlays.

These are Mayan flared 0g plugs from beautiful Peruvian turquoise that a customer brought back from Peru for us to work into some pieces for her.

A set of gorgeous 1″ Chiapas amber included plugs that are actually available here on the site in the amber section.

I have a couple of other things to post but I’m sitting at a friend’s cafe and my laptop battery is about to die, so that’ll have to be it for the evening. I hope you enjoy the eyecandy!

We hope everyone had a great labor day weekend. We were closed Monday (postal holiday) but were right back at it Tuesday morning. So far this week we’ve made a couple of interesting sets of jewelry of note. The first is a set of really pretty 1″ Rutilated Quartz plugs – custom width and domed faces/flat backs. Tons of super fine rutile that just glows like strands of gold in the nearly crystal clear quartz.

This set is one of the several sets I am working on from this material, which we acquired a while back. See this blog post for an explanation of what these golden strands are.

The other particularly rad set of jewelry I photographed prior to shipment was this set of wild 1.5″ green fluorite plugs with tons of inclusions and hints of clear and purple fluorite throughout as well. For some reason the exact shade of green was virtually impossible to convey via the camera, even in natural daylight, so the color is a little bit muted. But you get the idea! Definitely one of the more unique sets of jewelry we’ve sent out in terms of color and pattern.

We should have a restock of many horn and bone items to throw up on the site here very soon, as well as some possible pre-made stone stock. Keep your eyes peeled over the next two weeks!