Lapidary Journal Jewelry Artist

THERE’S A REASON WHY our projects often read more like stories than instructions, and it’s not simply a matter of style. It’s a matter of choice — your choice. Faceting and chain maille designs both depend on mathematically precise patterns, but jewe

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Tamara Honoman EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Merle White MANAGING EDITOR Karla A. Rosenbusch CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Tom & Kay Benham, Lexi Erickson, Sharon Elaine Thompson ADVERTISING MANAGER Marilyn Koponen, ph. 877-613-4613 CLASSIFIED ADS Stepha

Riff on the design of any of these or other pieces within this issue, using a design feature such as color, texture, form, value, line, space, repetition, balance, contrast, unity, or variety for your sketch. Please indicate which piece your entry is

SALLY BASS, SO YOUNG PARK, AND HISANO SHEPHERD — three designers with distinctly different design aesthetics and approaches — are all laser-focused on bespoke niches that set them apart in a competitive jewelry market. The trend among them is their s

FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS, grayling trout shimmered in the Thunder Bay River watershed where I live. Then in the 1800s, they began to disappear, victims of logging pollution and dams. Known scientifically as Thymallus thymallus, these fish, however, con

WORKING WITH A FULL-SERVICE lost-wax casting company can save time, money, and wear and tear on your hands. Create a single wax carving, and you can acquire duplicates of that design in a variety of sizes — in days instead of months. This is thanks t

1 Rule of Thumb. “Don’t use it if you don’t want to lose it!” Seriously, don’t push with your thumb. If there’s a crack in the rough, it will suddenly part and you will jam your thumb into the spinning blade. That’s a painful reminder that a diamond

WE SIMPLY HAD TO go after it. The colors, the patterns, the occasional dendrites were all out there waiting for someone, we were told. One look at this new rhyolite, and we knew we were the someone. A geologist working in Chile, my partner in this ve

I COULDN’T WAIT to try making something with a new gem material I got in Tucson this year. It’s a rhyolite from Chile with dramatic patterning, which I got from Gemologist John, aka John Heusler. He calls this new find blanket stone (red and green bl

WHEN I FOUND a beautiful, red coral cabochon at a gem show, I knew I would make a pendant with it. I wanted a floral design, and I’ve been wanting to try my hand at engraving. So why not put it all together? I decided to engrave the floral design and

SIMPLICITY IN jewelry design can sometimes be enough. Using a basic shape like a circle and making small modifications to it can lead to shapes with “significant form,” to use a Clive Bell phrase. A noted art critic, Bell discussed this concept of ae

A CLASSIC, GO-ANYWHERE design, these silver circle earrings hang from wires and offer a bit of the unexpected. The texture on this strip of flat wire is curled to the inside of the ring, instead of being front and center on the outside. You could jus

SO THERE YOU ARE, sitting on a pile of scrap. What to do? With some care, you can cast it any number of low-tech ways, recycle it, or alloy it into a lower silver content, such as 80/20 reticulation metal. Before you do that, try fusing your leftover

45 YEARS’ JEWELRY MANUFACTURING EXPERIENCE. We use de-oxidized sterling silver alloy, ZERO firescale! Metals used include de-ox sterling silver, de-ox 10,14,18k gold in yellow white and red, de-oxidized yellow bronze, silicon bronze, and white bronze

Find the finest rock shops, jewelry supplies and lapidary materials. Whether you need jewelry findings, mineral and fossil specimens, rough material, lapidary equipment, gems, findings, jewelry, or the perfect gift, you can find it here. For informat

4919 Broadway, Unit 15 Boulder, CO 80304 (720) 346-3233 info@bouldermetalsmiths.com www.bouldermetalsmiths.com Located in beautiful Boulder, Colorado, BoMA offers workshops taught by world-class instructors for all levels from beginners to profession