Faceting a Space Ship

One of our more active club members, Bruce, has recently gotten involved in gemstone faceting. You can often find him at the shop sitting in front of one of the faceting machines sliding his stone over the grinding plate and fashioning some of his arcane projects.



Bruce likes to do unusual designs for his stones instead of the same old thing. His current project when I was at the shop was taking clear pieces of quartz and shaping and polishing them into large faceted gemstones in the shape of space ships.


A closeup of one of his stones half way done shows some of the facet faces on the stone already polished and reflective while some of the other facet faces are still milky looking from lack of polish.





An end on view shows the likeness of the spaceship more clearly.

Malaysian Silver Art (actually from Sumatra apparently..)

Seek and ye shall find! Every weekend, my mother likes to make the garage sale circuit. Many times, she finds little of interest but sometimes she makes some extraordinary finds. One day several weeks ago, she was rummaging at the bottom of an old box filled with heavy plastic dolls when she spied silvery colored lattice work. Carefully digging further, she realized that covered by these ugly worthless dolls were solid sterling silver lattice house replicas. She began to pull out whimsical little silver houses, one after the other, many with weird pointy roofs, for a total of nine pieces including a palm tree and and an ox pulling a cart. The wheels even turn on the cart! Trying to maintain her composure, my mother asked the woman having the garage sale, as casually as she could, "How much for the little houses?"

"Three bucks!" the woman said!

My mother was so surprised that she quickly gave the woman three bills, bundled up the silver houses, and drove off immediately before anyone else would notice what she had! There in the top photo, you can see my hand holding one of the medium sized houses, which is as big as my hand. Unfortunately, when I took the photo, I accidentally left off the top little point of the roof. A week later, the same woman had another garage sale and my mother returned to ask where the little houses had come from, but the lady did not remember. And there was nothing similar or valuable anywhere else in that sale. And you can bet my Mother looked hard!

However, some clues were to be had about the houses' origins because on the back of the largest house was written in silver, "KT Gedang Perak 925." 925 universally means silver, so that was the easiest part. The rest took some serious work on Google, but I finally deciphered it. 'Perak' means 'silver' in Malaysian. KT stands for 'Kuala Terenggano,' a large city in Malaysia. And 'Gedang' is likely a different spelling for 'Gadang' as in 'Rumah Gadang.'

What, you say you don't know what a 'Rumah Gadang' is? Well that's good because neither did I! Luckily, Wikipedia knows and has a fascinating article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumah_Gadang . In case I ever had any doubt of the authenticity of these cute little houses, once I saw this photo below of the real thing (taken from the Wiki article), I realized these little silver houses were not constructed from whimsy at all but in fact were careful replicas of the real thing, even down to the little points on the rooftops. Wow, these places make my home like a shack!

I guess it's not surprising, then, with all this effort into the decor, that these are the traditional homes of a Sumatran clan called the Minangkabau whose cultural structure is matrilineal. That means the women own and run the property in this clan and these houses are passed from mother to daughter. Take note all you men! ;-P But the religious and political affairs are typically left to the men, so I guess they aren't completely left out. However, what is even more interesting is that these people have kept their traditional matrilineal culture, even though their culture is also strongly Islamic.

Although the clan is from Sumatra, many have settled in Malaysia and one can only surmise there is or was probably one of these houses in Kuala Terenggano somewhere, which is why 'KT' was written on the back of the silver replicas. All this from a garage sale, I swear you just can't make this stuff up!

(And in case anyone feels the urge to mention there are only eight structures in the photo instead of nine, I'll let you know now that the 9th structure was another ox and cart but the cart got squished by the heavy ugly dolls that were on top of it and my Mother is trying to carefully repair it, so it did not make it into the photo.)

[Updated 4/2014  Well looks like my sleuthing was not as accurate as one would like, I was informed by a kind observer of the following: These are not from Kuala Terengganu in Malaysia but from Kota Gadang in Sumatra. KT is short for Koto. Pieces like this were made for sale to visitors way back - they may be from the 1920s or so.]

Eldon's Secret Purple Agate

Eldon, one of the newer members of our rock club, recently moved into town. Eldon has extensive experience with rockhounding, silversmithing, casting, stone cutting, etc and always finds time to help the rest of us with any sticky lapidary problems.

Recently, sitting around the table chatting at the rock shop, he told me the story of how one time long ago when he was working up in Northern Arizona, he ran into a man who had found a secret cache of beautiful purple agates up in the mountains. Eldon, of course, was immediately interested in the location of this agate, but the man would not immediately tell him. He wanted to keep it a secret, but he did give Eldon a very general vague description of the approximate location, such that Eldon would know where to start looking.

However, the description was so vague and the area was so vast that Eldon could not find it after many tries. Time after time, he went out searching, and each time, he came back to the man and told him where he had gone looking. Each time, as Eldon related his tale, the man would laugh gently when Eldon reached the point in his description where he had turned the wrong way. So each time, Eldon was given a new clue as to the location. And so he would try again.

Two years later, Eldon finally found his purple agate. The collecting area was not large, but many nodules of banded purple agate were to be found and each rock had to be packed out many miles through rough terrain before it reached civilization.

Some of the rocks had large spot patterns similar to ocean jasper. Others had many well delineated bands of color. Some just had gentle shadings of purple. All were beautiful and to this day, as far as we know, only Eldon and that one other man know of this secret agate location. Neither has ever told a single soul.

Here are some of the slabs and artworks that Eldon has created from his secret purple agate nodules. The butterfly body is cast in silver. The bracelet was a gift to his wife. These are not for sale, but they sure are nice to look at!

Pretty in Pink

San Diego is famous for its tourmaline mines, but sometimes it's just faster to buy one than to try to find it yourself, especially if you want a big one! Here Dave helps Rick weigh the tourmaline he recently bought from the Quartzsite, Arizona show. For any machine related question, big or small, Dave is the one to run to!


Rick usually trends towards blue colored stones but this rock is mostly pink and only shades into blue on the end. It weighs approximately 14 grams but since Rick had already added a small piece of plastic onto the rough edge to help level it for capping, we don't know the exact weight. In the second picture, you can see the not yet completely polished silver cap that Rick made for it already placed onto the stone.

Name that Stone!

This blue stone was sold to a store by a mystery person off the street. Its origins are unknown. I bought the rough and cut this blue agate material out of the host rock to make these two blue cabachons and this necklace. The color of the cabs is a striking bright blue and on one corner along the side (too small to be visible to the camera), is a small 'flower' of what looks like malachite. I got the rough for nine dollars, what a deal! Does anyone have any idea where this material might have originally come from? Since it's blue and looks like agate, I am guessing it's likely to be a high quality gem silica of some kind, probably from an older collecting location.

Update: OK, looks like most people agree this rock is probably gem silica, perhaps from Arizona. It also looks similar to Needles Blue agate, which is also a very nice colored blue stone, but the host rock on my cabs does not look like rhyolite which is often the host rock of Needles blue. Here is a pic of the back of the cabs which shows some host rock that I left behind when I cabbed it.