Plastic is a lightweight material that comes in an exciting variety of forms and colours and is very easily worked. It is often considered solely as a substitute for materials such as glass, wood or metal but, in fact, it has properties that make it totally unique as a crafts material.
It is made up from [...]
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Having chosen your stones, polished them and found a suitable mount to match, you can now start to assemble your jewelry pieces. If a lot of care has already gone into preparation and design, this should be the simplest part of the process but care should still be taken to ensure the best possible results.
Making [...]
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The cutter’s job would be relatively simple if all diamonds were perfect octahedrons. Such crystals are, however, the exception rather than the rule. Many stones have been broken or are irregular in shape, and these are known as cleavages. Others are triangular in form and are known as macles. ‘Flats’ are irregular pieces, like fragments [...]
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Amethyst
Because amethyst has now become popular again, fine stones of a rich royal purple colour, free from inclusions, have become quite expensive. Though Brazil and Africa, particularly Zambia, seem to contain limitless supplies of amethyst, only a small amount of the material taken out of the ground is suitable for jewellery and only a tiny [...]
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This large and miscellaneous collection of gems are all crystalline or micro-crystalline silicas of one kind or another. Silica is one of the commonest substances in the earth’s crust and it has been calculated that quartz represents 12 per cent of all rocks on the earth. By no means all this quartz is usable for [...]
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