Customers attending the event will receive 30% off stocked items and made to order standard products such as wood plugs, tunnels, Mayan flared wood items, etc. We are also offering 20% off custom orders booked with a deposit. Other great deals will be available as well, including a chance to peek through sealed and labeled clearance/seconds/discontinued jewelry in many sizes, styles and materials at HUGE discounts, and even bulk discounts (buy 3 get 1 free, buy 5 get 2 free, etc). We want this stuff gone!

We’ll also be giving workshop tours and explaining how our jewelry is made, showing off our new hardware-fixed inlays including the capability to inlay stone into stone (and even triple stone inlays) with no adhesives, and our antiquities collection and research library will be available for browsing as you please.

• Friday, March 12th :: 7pm – 10pm
• Saturday, March 13th :: 12pm – 5pm
• 30% off Stocked/MTO products
• 20% off custom orders with deposit
• (Discounts apply to in store sales only)

The event address is as follows (Click it for a Google map):

Onetribe, 403 Stockton St. Richmond, VA 23224

We are at ground level right in the middle of a large brick warehouse between 4th and 5th streets on Stockton in the Manchester district of Richmond, VA. There is a large lot across the street to park in, and our entrance is right across from the lot. Look for the large Onetribe logo over the door.

If you have any question, please don’t hesitate to get in touch by emailing us from our contact page or calling 804.248.0971. If you’re on Facebook, there is an event page for this event if you’d like to RSVP. If you’re within a reasonable distance, please do come out (and bring friends!) for some great deals and good times, we’d love to meet you in person!

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.

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!

During that time our site will remain up and we will continue taking orders, but we will not begin filling those orders or returning correspondence (unless it’s extremely urgent) until we return to work fresh and ready to rock it on January 4th. At that point we will resume production  and order fulfillment starting with the oldest orders first and working forward until we are caught up, which usually takes a week or two.

Have a great holiday!

Please see this Holiday FAQ for more information.

Jared, Rachel, Marshall & Amanda

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!

Our technical contact spotted this amazingly quickly and locked down the server and killed the mail queue – unfortunately many messages did make it through.

No actual customer data was compromised (we do not actually store ANY financial information on our server, simply your email and shipping information), so you may rest assured that even if you did receive some random spam from Taiwan, it is nothing more than a huge pain in the ass for you and us.

For those of you that did receive messages, I am very, very sorry that this happened. Please rest assured that we are working our asses off to figure out how this happened so that it will never happen again. Unfortunately with automated server system updates and general things-moving-at-the-speed-of-light nature of the internet, it is impossible to guarantee that everything is safe 24/7/365. There are literally thousands, if not near millions of automated systems constantly scouring the internet looking for vulnerable host computers (both commercial servers and your and our own personal computers) to do these sorts of things with.

Again, we are very sorry about any inconvenience this may cause. This has completely ruined our holiday break and we have been and will continue to be working diligently toward a resolution, and quite possibly a server move and full system rebuild just to be on the safe side. We understand that in doing business with us, you are entrusting us with your personal information, and we are both very sorry and determined as hell to make sure this never, ever happens again.

Jared and the Onetribe Team

UPDATE: We have identified the problem as having been a vulnerability with a specific facet of the shopping cart software (present in the actual software package) and not the server security itself. The issue has been resolved.

We will answer emails, return calls and fulfill orders in the order everything is received upon returning.

Those of you doing your own traveling, be safe!

Jared & The Onetribe Crew

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.

Red/orange and green are the most common colors, with harder to find colors being various shades of blue, pink and purple. The value of ammolite is determined by how many colors there are, how clear they are, and the overall brilliance of the color shine. Many stones exhibit different colors at different angles.

Below you will find examples of ammolite cabochons in our collection. We have the ability to source more for color, size or shape, but keep in mind that the price increases DRASTICALLY by size and it is easily possible to end up paying mid three to low four digit prices for large specimens. We have chosen the sizing we currently have because of the affordability of our source at these sizes.

We currently have 8mm and 10mm rounds and 9×11mm ovals available for setting into the following styles:

• Solid or concave plugs in any material
• Mayan flared styles
• Single flared jewelry of any style for conches, flats, etc
• Round or oval labrets

We can set the ammolites into the following metals (either prong or bezel) for hardware attachment to the material composing the wearable surface of the jewelry:

• .925 Sterling Silver
• Yellow or White Gold
• Copper (bright, matte, textured/etc)
• Brass

Pricing will vary by the cost of the ammolite material itself (taking into account the colors wanted and quality of the stones), the overall design and construction of the jewelry (the stone or wood used, and the metal that the setting is composed of) and the amount of labor involved in completing the project. If you’re interested in wearing a piece of this beautiful gemstone, please get in touch!

The second slab is of similar pattern but displays deep blues, tans and nice earthy browns and is incredibly translucent. This slab measures 7″ x 5″ x 1″.

We can make just about anything from these stones:

• Very large plugs/concaves/tunnels
• Mayan flared jewelry of relatively large size
• Carved items such as weights and rings
• Cabochon inlays of this material or into this material

Priority will be given to projects of larger size as they will do more to showcase the various colors and texture in the banding, although there will inevitably be cut-offs and material left for smaller projects, so don’t hesitate to ask.

We would prefer to do interesting stuff instead of just plain plugs, and because both of these stones are relatively translucent, we would love to do at least one set of decent sized standard or Mayan flared tunnels with large cabochons of these materials inlaid so you can see light through them.

If you have interest in having jewelry made from these items, please get in touch!