Hey everyone, I finished cutting another stone on Saturday. It's another citrine, and another square, this one right about 8mm (give or take .5mm--can't remember). This stone is a much nicer colour, and a lot brigher. It's got a lot more orange in it, and due to the simplicity of the pavilion (bottom), has a lot of really bright, colourful flash. Very fun to look at :) Cutting went well. I think there were only one or two minor problems. I give myself a B+, and I'm quite happy with it. There is one flaw I was hoping would cut out, but didn't, visible on the left side of the stone in this picture. I could have cut it out, but the stone would be nearly half the size it is now, and I like finishing large stones. There are more views below, and here is a diagram of what the stone physically looks like, for those interested. I uploaded one for the previous stone, too.



-P.

Damn I'm glad to be done with school! In school, class and projects took up so much of my time and energy I really didn't have room for anything else in my life. That meant giving up things I really enjoyed like making comics, playing the bass, and faceting (cutting gemstones). I've been doing these things again since I moved to Auburn, and it feels so good. The machine on the right here is my Facetron faceting machine. A stone is mounted to a brass stick (dop) and then held in place by that mechanical arm, which allows you to cut and polish faces of the stone at specific angles and indexes. It's awesome.

Just last night I finished cutting this stone: it's a 7.62mm 'twisted square' cut natural citrine. It came out fairly well. All in all I'd give the stone a B or B-. The pavilion isn't quite perfect (though you have to have a magnifier to tell) and there are some chips on the girdle. This was probably the most brittle piece of citrine I've ever worked with; and that's saying something because I've cut a lot of citrine.



Here are some other views. Getting good photographs of stones is hard, and I'm gonna need some practice. For one, I should have taken this picture on something that wasn't a paper towel. Also, daylight would have really helped.

This actually isn't the first stone I cut since starting again, I started with a smoky quartz round brilliant, which ended in disaster when my wax joint broke while cutting in the crown star facets. *SAD FACE!*


The holiday season is coming up fellas. If you want to commission a stone for that lovely lady in your life, come talk to me :)
-P.