TaoGem Gemstones

I have been sending out a great many gemstones made of a variety of minerals to gemstone jewelry designers for over a year now.

If you have subscribed to my site then you have probably been following along as I add new blog entries. More to the point of this blog post is another recent blog entry about how excited I am about the learning of metal clay as my choice towards beginning to make a special line of jewelry. We are talking a bit about it on the forum too. We are fortunate to have a certified metal clay artist sharing here expertise with myself and other members there as well.

Any way, lets get to the point of this post regarding Jasper Minerals that are available to jewelry designers.

The list is certainly long, and there is no such thing as a poor looking Jasper cabochon. When it comes to designing gemstone jewelry, a favorite among Jaspers, are the Picture types. When I start to day dream or sketch out jewelry pieces, I imagine many of them with a Jasper of some type set in them. Usually a really interesting and unique picture jasper! Here are a very few recent Picture type Jasper favorites of mine.

Remembering that we have to start with a chunk of Picture Jasper rough, and slab it up for preform cabochons before we can get a great looking picture cabochon. One thing for sure is when I cut into any Picture Jaspers, it is just one big surprise waiting to happen. I never know what the piece of jasper rough holds until it is slabbed up.

Another reason that the Picture Jasper makes for interesting and unusual jewelry is the ability to make stunning matched pairs ideal for earrings. Here is one pair of Picture Jaspers and a few Owyhee Picture matched pairs. You can see what I mean! Another interesting part to being able to even think about making quality matching cabs is the part about how it takes two back to back slabs from the same piece of rough to be able to accomplish identical pairs.

These few pictures hardly begin to cover just how much interesting and unique variety there can be when considering Picture Jaspers for our gemstone jewelry designs.

Once I get to setting some of these beauties in some nice bezel / metal clay settings, you can bet that I will be posting some blog entries all about them!

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 18th, 2008 at 12:23 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.