TribeBlog

If you have ordered a set of wood jewelry from Onetribe within the past few years, chances are Marshall was involved in the production of it.

He produces the majority of the wood plugs, concaves, Mayan flared wood pieces and wood rings that come out of our Richmond, VA workshop. Marshall was let loose in our workshop alongside Jared (the owner) as our secondary wood jeweler and eventually worked his way into the primary production position where he manages the day to day production of all of our standard wood products.

Finished up a small batch of Labradorite for custom orders this morning. Here’s a shot of all of them together. Chances are, if you’re waiting for Lab from us and you haven’t received it yet, it’s in this photo. The largest set is 3/4″ and the smallest is 7/16″.

The set on the bottom is 00g Mayan flared with a really nifty minty green-blue striped pattern and is for sale has been sold. We can probably make similar pieces, I’ll have to check our rough. We can always do Mayan flared stuff though if you want more face to your pieces.

If you’re interested in Lab pieces, email us. I still have quite a bit of rough left. I may even be able to pull more weirdness like this out of some of it but it can’t be very big. I can do lab probably up to at least 1.5″ though, maybe near 2″ with what I have on hand. If you’re bigger, please ask, heck I’ll make 4″ Lab pieces if you want. I love the stuff.

We took a new employee photo today because the old one was kind of boring and.. well, old. This new one is pretty sweet.

Also, we caught Cameron during a moment of relaxation this morning between photo shoots. When he’s not filling orders or piercing, he’s generally off somewhere being epic. Cameron enjoys riding bikes, Nascar, intelligible art metal, and living dangerously on the daily.

Exactly one week ago we had the grand opening party for Onetribe’s Adorn studio space, here in Richmond, VA. The turnout was wonderful (we had between 80 and 90 people through!) and everyone was incredibly supportive and very positive about our efforts. We have, for some time now, been slowly working on opening a retail showroom, antiquities museum and procedural space in the “clean” portion of our studio.

Our office in Richmond consists of 4,200s/f of space in an old 1930’s warehouse in the Manchester arts district. The majority of that (just shy of 3000s/f) is composed of Onetribe’s workshop, stock storage and order filling areas. The adjacent showroom space is about 1,000sf plus the 180s/f procedural room. The showroom space houses floor cases dedicated to Onetribe products, and wall cases dedicated to both Onetribe products, as well as the vendors that we retail for the piercing studio – Gorilla Glass, Quetzalli, Anatometal, Neometal and BVLA. The walls also house our two current Eastern and Western hemisphere antiques displays, showcasing 40-2000+ year old body jewerly from around the world.

We’ve posted pictures here and there of our studio before but I figured it might be neat to give a photo tour of our space so you can really get a feel for what we’re standing in every day while we’re making your jewelry or answering your emails.

Starting from outside, our place doesn’t look like much. Just a giant logo above our patio (great for cookouts/events!) and some bamboo growing along the side of the building.

Standing on the porch looking toward the door we’ve got our strawberry patch to the left and some potted bamboo growing out. If you stop by in late spring we’ve had beautiful and yummy organic strawberries for the past two years.

Walking in the door you get your first glimpse of what we do here. To the right we’ve got our workshop, followed by the order filling/stock areas and the showroom immediately at the other end of this space. The pathway is very wide with plenty of open space so that we can have events (art openings, project space, meetings for the non-profit, etc) and accommodate pretty much anything. If you look closely at the floor you’ll notice the remnants of the EPIC hopscotch course we had on the floor (from the entrance to the showroom) for the studio grand opening.

The workshop is the heart and soul of the goings-on at Onetribe. Mounted on the safety wall are three plaques which describe what each of the three workshop bays is used for. In order from the entrance forward, they are lapidary, metalsmithing and woodworking.

The lapidary bay contains an amalgamation of very old and new tools for grinding and carving stone and amber. Several various sorts of spinning diamond grit wheels, hand carving bits and tools, files and other assorted hard things for grinding. The shelves are lined with diamond coated saw blades, books and boxes of rough stone. Not in the photo are several pallets of boxes of rough stone in the area between the safety wall and the bay.

I personally spend most of my time in this bay, and if you’ve ever gotten a custom stone piece or cabochon from Onetribe, it was likely made by my hands somewhere within the confines of this photograph.

The next bay over is the metalsmithing bay, arguably the cleanest of the three because everything that happens here not only produces little to no dust but it NEEDS to be clean for doing enamel work, polishing and for the small kiln at the other end of the bay. If you’ve ever gotten anything with silver or gold from us, particularly bezel set pieces, this is where the bezel was made or finished and the stone was set, likely by our resident jeweler Sidney D.

Most of what happens here in the Richmond workshop on a daily basis is wood, and the man in charge of that is Marshall Brown. Marshall is in the wood bay daily lathe turning or hand working all of the woods on our site. Concaves, standard plugs, tunnels, Mayan flared pieces – most of these are made to order daily by Marshall. When we are particularly busy, I will take over the second lathe position and help clear out those orders. Tools in this bay are your standard woodworking varieties – two bench lathes, a bandsaw, belt sander, dust collection, hand carving tools, various chisels, blades, saws, sanding implements, finishing buffers, etc.

The next thing you’d pass walking toward the showroom is the customer service and jewelry stock storage area. If you send us an email or place an order, everything having to do with your inquiry or order generally happens in this area. In front of this area is our employee bike corral, and behind it is the employee lounge/break area.

The customer service area itself consists of several printers, our primary order filling/email machine, and LOTS of jewelry on all of those shelves. This is where we pull pre-made stock for our orders and pack boxes for shipment. Here Rachel and Cameron were working on doing inventory this morning because the post office is closed for July 4th and we’re unable to ship.

As you pass this you’d be close enough to the showroom door to undersand there’s something way different on the other side of that wall. Your first views would be of misc. retail (batik fabric, our t-shirts and tote bags, normal earrings, hair sticks and misc. things that we either make in house or purchase during our travels) and our studio administration area, where Rachel spends most of her time dealing with the administrative back end of the business. My wreck of desk space is also immediately to the right as you walk through the showroom door.

Continuing around the admin area you’d come across our conference area. This is a dedicated space for pulling out material samples and drawings and working one on one with people for custom orders. This allows customers to stop by and pick out unique materials and discuss the specific drawings and designs for their unique jewelry items. The walls are lined with mounted prints of previous custom projects for inspiration.

We’re now getting into the exciting part of the showroom. Rounding the corner and looking back toward the open space you get a good glimpse of all of the display cases, lounge and piercing procedural area.

Right now the showroom contains three 12s/f bamboo & glass floor displays organized into three categories: wood/bamboo, animal materials (horn, bone, antler), and stone/amber/precious metals. We decided this would be a very intuitive way to lay out natural products because we have a lot of customers that prefer not to wear animal materials, and this way they don’t even have to worry about browsing them alongside the jewelry that they can wear. The cases currently contain every Onetribe product, as well as a few favorites from our friend Ana of Quetzalli jewelry in Mexico City.

There are two kinds of cases on the bamboo display walls – product cases and museum cases. The product cases are 34″ square bamboo and glass displays featuring products from Onetribe (namely items that look nice backlit – translucent stones, amber, translucent horn), as well as precious metal items from Quetzalli, Titanium from Anatometal and Neometal, and glass from Gorilla Glass.

Adorn has the largest selection of the highest quality jewelry in the area. Quality over quantity – no steel, no acrylic, all procedural jewelry is ASTM certified implant grade or simply inert (glass). Everything we carry is what we believe to be the best in the world – we wear it daily and we trust our client safety to those companies, all of which we have personal relationships with.

We now have all of our antiques on display for visitors to view. The displays currently include two horizontal bamboo & glass cases featuring Eastern and Western hemisphere body jewerly from around the world. The Eastern collection currently features jewelry from Mainland and Southeast Asia and Oceania.

The Western case houses our greenstone, shell, obsidian and quartz items from the Maya, Aztec and other Mesoamerican cultures.

To accompany the collections we have compiled reference lists and a world map featuring numbered pins which corrollate the geographical location of the antiquies with the resource lists and the items themselves, which are numbered in the cases.

At the back end of the showroom we have our lounge and waiting area for the procedural room. It includes our library of anthropological and body modification related books and journal articles, as well as a television which we use for showing videos on various indigenous cultures.

Opposite that space is our piercing procedure room. We haven’t figured out what we’re going to put up on the ledge, either large scultures or lots of plants. The piercing room is just under 200s/f and is visually split with a structural column that separates the procedural from the sterilization area. The Virginia regulations for piercing procedural areas, jewelry and practices are, in our opinion, far too lax, and we’ve made every attempt to far exceed them so that we may serve as a model for future regulatory matters.

The box to the left is a UV air sterilization unit. We are a fully disposable, freehand shop so the room itself is quite sparse in terms of things sitting on counters and storage. To the right of this area is the sterilization room.

The room is spacious enough to allow for viewers if the client requests their presence, and we have always had in mind the idea of doing classes for the parents of teens and anyone else that wanted to attend, about what to look for when choosing a studio for tattooing or piercing procedures. The size allows us to pile quite a few people in for explanations on tools or sterile practices, but the shape of the room keeps it feeling cozy when it’s emptier.

We utilize a Statim 2000 cassette autoclave, which allows us to sterilize everything needed for one procedure and maintain a working sterile field without packing items into packages and doing a bunch of opening and shuffling around. There are a couple of items not shown in the setup, including our anodizer which allows us to anodize any of our Titanium to a specific color in house before the procedure.

That’s Onetribe! Thank you to everyone that has supported our efforts to bring this new studio, Onetribe Adorn, to fruition. This opens a new chapter in the story of Onetribe, now going on seven years of loyal service to the body modification industry and now proudly serving the needs of our current and future local customers. People should have a knowledgeable and safe place to learn about and receive procedures, and we saw a need for it in our area, so we’ve created what we believe to be the best thing we could to fill that need. A beautiful space where people can learn about and obtain beautiful jewelry items, receive unparalleled procedural service, and most importantly, a place where people can come and just be themselves.

If you happen to be a member of the Richmond press, you might find one of these on your desk in a couple of days. A formal introduction letter and hand-made press packet which contains a short editorial about the importance of body adornment, an eight page booklet about Onetribe and our new showroom and museum, a pack of 12 product shots of things we have made and a formal invitation to attend our opening on June 26th.

In other news, we finished some nice jewelry at the end of last week for custom orders, including two very pretty sets of Labradorite jewelry in 1″ and 18mm (you guys know who you are, the rest is coming soon) and a set of beautiful Amazonite concave faced plugs with slightly larger front faces.

I spent this weekend writing an informational document on the origin of the “Mayan flare” style of jewelry. We’ve seen some confusion among customers and misinformation from vendors about what constitutes a style fitting of this label, so I figured I’d whip up a little something for the Enlightenment section of the site.

The direct link if you wish to share it on your weblog, forum or whatever is: http://onetribe.nu/enlightenment/article/22

The full text is below for convenience:

Mayan Flares, Ancient and Today

Jared A. Karnes, Onetribe LLC

I believe one of the biggest downsides to the resurgence of body modification as a social norm is the severe lack of context. Very little information about body modifying cultures is provided by vendors of goods or services to customers, and this is due in part to the unfortunately money driven mass production nature of the industry. I can count on my hands the number of piercing studios I have been to or jewelry vendors I have seen that had any visible indication of knowledge of the vastly rich cultures from which we draw our inspiration for scarification, tattooing and body piercing today. Of course there may seem to be many within “the scene” of commonly known artists, studios and vendors; however, that is but a tiny cross section of the total number of people currently engaging in practices dating to tens of thousands of years.

“Mayan flared” is a term that has been thrown around a great deal in recent years, but many people do not realize the historical significance of this style of jewelry. We wish to speak about the origins of this style and offer clarification on what we believe the terminology to accurately suggest.

*Note* For the sake of simplification, in this document we will refer to the entirety of the Maya ethnic group as simply “Maya” or “Mayan,” although the term itself is not indicative of the vast number of distinctly different cultures, settlements and languages which existed during the Pre-Classic and Classic Maya time periods.

The ears had immense significance to the Maya, as they were believed to be conduits for spiritual energy, and thus ear flares had considerable value and importance in culture. Forms of obsidian, shell, ceramic and stone were worn in ear perforations. Some designs for daily wear were similar to standard solid plugs or thin tunnels of today, but the most prolific reminders of Maya body modification are the large ear flares shown in sculpture and craft.

The traditional Mayan flared piece consists of an exceptionally larger front face than a standard double flared piece of jewelry in the same size. There is no standard ratio of saddle to face size for these pieces, and often times size was a result of the limitations of the size and shape of river pebbles or small stones of jadeite. There is, however, a particular concept which should be adhered to in the modern production and classification of these pieces: the original design was meant to resemble a flower. That is, the front face must be significantly larger than the wearable area so as to present a wide view of the face and general “trumpet” or “funnel” shape of either the face itself or the visual lines from front flare to rear edge of the piece upon side view.

Although later pieces sometimes included precious metals, the majority of the pieces now in existence are ancient pieces made of ceramics and sacred green stones, jadeite being of the most value and highest regard. The pieces varied greatly in size and shape, and were not always worn in the ear lobe – archeological and anthropological research suggests that large flares were often attached to belts, and strands of beads as neckwear. Pieces were also kept as heirlooms and re-utilized in many ways by family members, and even later cultures, as with Maya inscriptions on Olmec artifacts. This cultural reappropriation could aid in the explanation of the excessive drilling along the surface of some flares discovered. Many made specifically for burial rites or ritual purposes were incredibly large – the famous “Pomona” flare exhibits a front face of seven inches and an internal hollow area of over three inches in diameter. This immensely large piece is also curious in that it has four groupings of glyphs etched into the face. Other pieces sometimes have etched designs or incised lines adorning the faces, and in some cases pieces are literally carved to resembled flower petals.

Although pieces varied stylistically throughout Maya history, with some being more angled, others trumpet shaped and a few known being squared in shape, the majority retained the characteristic large front face and flower profile.

Many pieces contained strands of beads or tufts of fiber thread which protruded from the face. Of particularly creative nature were the true “flower flares,” those pieces which exhibit a series of inner flares and protruding beads, sometimes several inches long, through which strands of natural fiber were attached to a counterweight at the rear to hold the entire assemblage together in the lobe. In traditional Maya ear spool work, the large flare symbolizes the calyx of the flower, and the protruding front bead the pistol.

Complete sets of this nature are very rare as the fiber thread has long since degraded and pieces become separated very easily during digging, especially in the case of grave robbery or farm tillage which uproots burials and ruins containing these items. Some sets we have seen have been reassembled with beads and other parts that were most certainly not original to the set, but it is not unheard of for the Maya to recycle and reuse greenstone crafts because jadeite was an extremely valuable resource and was never wasted. As a result, the verification of originality when speaking of these sets is difficult to achieve.

The Onetribe Adorn Museum collection contains several fine examples of traditional Maya ear flares of varying sizes, mostly of jadeite but also from other fine greenstones present in Mesoamerica.

We have chosen select pieces and conducted a study of the shape and measurements of these pieces using a grid measurement system, the results of which are shown below. The system may seem a little confusing at first – these were never meant to be public, but I figured they would be interesting for assessing the scale of traditional pieces. Click the image below to view a directory of actual photos of pieces and measurement diagrams.

We were curious to analyze these pieces in an effort to define what exactly constitutes a historically correct version of this style. Due to the changes in the style of jewelry over the years, jewelry we are making today is much more versatile and wearable than piece from antiquity. We have relatively standardized our flare sizes and we regulate our front flare sizes for production items. The traditional style was very front heavy with all of the embellishments, and a counterweight was necessary – something we needn’t do today because our modern production methods of grinding stone allow us greater freedom in shaping pieces and adding an accurately sized rear flare to hold the piece in. Production of these styles requires more thought and engineering than standard jewelry due to the added front side weight, and fact that the sharp angle of rise from the saddle toward the front face requires a longer wearable area to fit properly.

You will find many beautiful examples of traditional ear flares in museums, but it is very hard to have a tactile cultural experience through glass. Onetribe is committed to the preservation and presentation of cultural information as it relates to modern body modification practices. The “Mayan flared” design is a favorite of ours here at Onetribe and we will continue to create both traditionally accurate and original modern versions of this classic style. It is our hope that this document will serve as a brief educational primer to our readers, but if nothing else, as simply a reminder of the rich history of body modifying cultures to come before us. We must respect and cherish the knowledge of those before to truly appreciate where we are now, and where we are going as we write our own history.

References:

Digby, Adrian. Maya Jades. Revised ed. Oxford: University Press, 1972.

Lange, Frederick [Ed]. Precolumbian Jade. Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah Press, 1993.

Grube, Nikolai [Ed]. Maya: Divine Kings Of The Rain Forest. Germany: Konemann, 2006.

This text ©2009 Onetribe LLC. You may link to this text, and you may reproduce it only in full and with copyright notices intact. Antique ear flare measurement illustrations and antique photographs (http://images.onetribe.nu/_antiquities/diagrams/) are ©2008 Onetribe LLC & Mike Moses. Plate photographs and multi-piece flare illustration obtained from the texts listed in the references, and are the property of their respective authors.

The physical printed references used for this document and/or the actual antique pieces of jewelry documented may be viewed at the Onetribe Adorn Museum during regular business hours or by appointment. Call 804.230.4486 or visit us at 403 Stockton St. Suite 101 Richmond, VA 23224.

There has been a lot of interest recently in Amazonite jewelry. For some cosmic reason for which we are currently unaware, we have had an odd influx of requests for us to restock jewelry from this particular stone. We had been looking for rough to no avail when we stumbled across a photo of a very pretty piece that had evidently originated from right here in Virginia, less than an hour from Onetribe headquarters.

Anyone that knows my crew personally knows that we are nosy little kids and we like to get dirty. We go on road trips for our stone and wood pretty frequently and really enjoy the adventure associated with personally sourcing the materials and choosing them by hand. So we got the bright idea to go right to the source. We did some snooping around and found the location and contact information for the owner of a mine here in Virginia that supposedly had a great deal of Amazonite. We made some phone calls and discovered that while the mine is currently closed and not open to the public, because we were local and were specifically interested in buying rough material the owner would meet us there the next day at 10am. We were excited but in no way prepared for the trip we had today.

The mine itself is located about an hour away from our studio out in the woods, about a hundred yards behind a simple metal gate with a No Trespassing sign on it. We arrived a bit early and spent some time walking around on the gravel road and into the woods checking out the wildlife (doves, woodpeckers and some sweet moss patches). The owner arrived and unlocked the gate and we proceeded toward the old, now mostly empty gift shop building. The first two things we saw were huge petrified wood logs (also originated from Virginia, a short distance away) and this several hundred pound monster – the biggest piece of Amazonite I’d ever seen to date.

We waited for the mine owner to feed the resident cat (a hugely fluffy sweetheart, black and orange and a little dirty) before proceeding a short distance behind the Gift Shop to a shed, a small office area and stone examination room full of buckets of Amazonite, quartz and several other types of stone from the mine. This wasn’t just any Amazonite, this was some of the nicest material I have ever personally laid eyes on.

This large gem grade specimen, slightly over 1lb in weight and completely solid in color with no inclusions, will likely become some very special pieces of jewelry.

We spent 30-40 minutes in the frigid cold going through these buckets, hand picking what we felt to be the best pieces for making our jewelry. At one point I kept dropping stones because they, and the air, were so cold I couldn’t feel them to hold onto them.

My staff are going to make fun of me for posting photos of myself, but to my credit, I wasn’t the one that took it and it’s one of the only ones we have of one of us holding a stone and not making a goofy face. We also met this monster, which evidently simply fell from the ceiling of the mine shaft a while back, so solid and dense that it landed on the rock floor without breaking. It’s nearly three feet long.

After a while we decided we needed to warm up so we took what we’d picked out at that point and headed back to the Gift Shop to weigh our bounty and warm up a bit. They still had some displays up and it was pretty amazing to get to see memorabilia from the early 1900’s when the mine was first started as well as some of the best samples of various stones that they had recovered over the years, old mining photos and equipment, etc. After taking a peek around we headed back out to another storage area, a large shipping container also full of mine specimens and  continued hand choosing suitable pieces of Amazonite, as well as some interesting crystal structures of quartz for our personal use.

Many of the materials are not sold, simply crushed and distributed across the grounds for school trips, which come as field trips and pay a set fee per student to learn about geology, shovel around in the ground for a while and leave with buckets of rad rocks for the classroom and the kids. Those materials had no prices so he gave us some pieces for us to try messing about with. From what I understand, most of the visitors and most of the funds are the result of these school and rock hound club trips to pan and screen for items found on the grounds, which they are permitted to keep. The Amazonite just happens to be the majority of the deposit located inside the mine itself, and the funds from these visitors helps offset the cost of the process of getting it out of the ground.

Another gem grade specimen, below, one of the nicest of the day, which was given to us on good faith, on the condition that it would serve as a display piece in our cases here at the studio. Sorry, guys, no jewelry from this one, but you’re welcome to come look at it after we polish it up

The owner offered to give us a short tour of the grounds before we weighed the rest of our picks and settled up, and being total nerds we jumped at the chance. Taking a stroll over the grounds, we were first shown the water trough and screens where collectors and kids are permitted to sort through their buckets of loot for quartz, garnet, amazonite and other local finds.

Cameron and Rachel pictured above chatting with the mine owner about the geology of the local land and what minerals can be found in the area. I wandered around with the camera a bit and found this beauty poking out of the ground.

A photo was enough, we found what we’d come looking for so this one stayed in the ground for a happy kid to find. We were then ushered further into the woods toward the actual mine operation itself, a surprisingly low tech setup consisting of a small building as the base of operations and a small vertical mine shaft which stretched down into the ground just shy of 100 feet, and extends for some 400+ feet underneath the grounds of the mine’s property.

A large wooden boom and winch are used to lower a large metal container into the ground which can accomodate a load of about 800lbs of rough material. The mining itself is accomplished by core drilling a circumference and using small blasts to continue forming the shaft in the intended direction. From there it’s all shovels and back-breaking hand work getting the rubble back to the shaft entrance to be hauled out.

In the photo above you can see some large pieces of Amazonite next to Cameron, and for scale, here they are again beside Rachel while she’s conversing with the miner.

We were permitted a peek down the shaft itself, which is currently filled with water. The water table constantly floods the mine, and pumps must be in operation 24hrs a day during the season when they are pulling out material. Because they have been closed for a while the pumps were off and you can see the water, which is very, very deep.

The temperature in the mine itself is surprisingly warm, as it’s a constant 50-something degrees after a certain distance underground, as the heat from the core of the earth radiates outward and you are insulated from the cold above. The haze in the bottom of the photo is actually the flash bouncing off steam rising from the water below.

Walking back up toward where we started, we had a chat about the mine itself, the history (for example, the government controlled the mine during WWII for its mineral content). It is a very small operation and you’d never know it was here if you were just wandering through the woods, aside from the signage and hints of machinery here and there. Really a super neat place.

At this point it was about time to pack up and head home, so we wandered back up to the Gift Shop to weight the rest of our stone and settle the financial aspect of the trip. We conversed for a while about this and that before parting ways with the kind gentleman that helped make the day possible. We were all elated as we headed back to the studio with our ~30lbs of hand picked Virginia Amazonite – we all admitted we were certainly surprised at the quality and even a little proud of our home state for “making” such a beautiful stone (yeah, we’re nerds).

So here’s the important part – the result of our cold day of nerding it up at a local mine for you guys! Some of the nicest Amazonite rough you’d ever want to see, some of which will be turned into cabochons, some of which will be sent to our other workshop to be turned into a stock run of Amazonite plugs far nicer than most anyone has ever seen before, some material that will be kept on hand here at the studio for custom orders, and some material that is just far too nice to do anything with other than sit and admire for its beauty and nature’s never-ending ingenuity.

Onetribe is about more than jewelry, it’s about an experience. A narrative.. a dialogue between you, us and this beautiful planet which never ceases to amaze. We truly enjoy discovering these materials and bringing them to you in the form of items to cherish as your own. We like to think that providing this kind of detail and level of interaction about how we work and what we do really appeals to many of you, as so many companies nowadays just source materials and mass produce things with no regard for history, tradition, or even simply your curiousity when it comes to the how and why of the products you seek to purchase. Thank you to all of you for allowing Onetribe to be a part of your journey.. we love it!