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heeyyyyy lol it’s been five years! here’s some stuff i’ve made recently- i’ve been working hard at my craft lol

deets!

1) chrysacolla (idk i can’t spell) cabachon in silver plated copper wire

2) raw pakimer quartz in silver plated copper

3) hematite included quartz (red from iron!) in gold colored silver plated copper

4) raw aquamarine in gold colored silver plated copper

5) raw pink tourmaline in gold colored silver plated copper

6) personal piece alert!!! hexagon labradorite faceted flatbacked in gold colored silver plated copper

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Rough pink morganite ring by LoveMirror

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Fossilized Snail Turned to Opal

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Hey, could you maybe tell us about Labradorite? I checked wiki but I don't understand half the words there. I'm not a giant rock fan, but I like cool rocks and Labradorite looks really cool. Sorry to bother you!

Okay, so, Labradorite.  Labradorite is complicated and sciencey, as all good rocks are.  I’ll see if I can explain it in a way that makes any sense!  (Once again, I’m not a scientist!  Correct me if I’m wrong!)

Most minerals, when they’re bright and pretty and colorful, look like that because while they were forming some impurities got mixed into them - usually metals like iron, copper, or titanium.  Without any impurities, these rocks would naturally be colorless.  We call these guys allochromatic (other-colored).

Other gemstones are certain colors because those elements are an important part of how they formed.  They’re not impurities that got mixed in, they’re actually part of the gemstone.  Their natural color IS the color you’re seeing.  We call them idiochromatic (inherently colored).

But labradorite doesn’t get its color from either of those things.  Labradorite is special.  It’s part of a third group: psudochromatic (false colored).  These rocks aren’t colorful at all, but they LOOK that way when light passes through them.

See, labradorite is actually just… grey.  From most angles, it looks like this:

You have to look at labradorite from a pretty specific angle to get those flashy colors, so when we cut it into cabochons for jewelry, or just polish up big pieces of it, we’re careful to do so at the most flattering angle, the angle that shows the most schiller, or “those cool glowy colors.”

Why just the one angle?  It’s all about labradorite’s crystal structure, and how it’s formed.

Labradorite is a rock that cooled down really slowly.  Because of that, it’s made of lots of very very thin layers of crystal, stacked on top of each other and all pretty much aligned in the same direction.  These are alternating layers of albite (mostly sodium), and orthoclase (mostly potassium), which solidify at very slightly different temperatures.  Labradorite is a rock that cooled in just the right way for a thin layer of albite to form, then a thin layer of orthoclase, then another thin layer of albite, and so on.

When light hits labradorite at the perfect angle to pass through a bunch of these layers, you get the schiller effect.  Basically, a little bit of the light gets bounced off the first layer and back to your eyes.  The rest of the light passes through to the second layer, and a little bit gets bounced back to your eyes again, and so on.  Every time more light gets sent back to you, it’s a little out of sync, and this makes it look like a different color.

(This is a very simplified way of explaining this.)

If these layers were all perfectly the same size, you’d get a uniform color, like the blue in moonstone.  But in labradorite, these layers might be different widths in different places, so different parts of the stone will reflect back wildly different colors!  We call this effect labradorescence to differentiate it from the uniform colored adularescence found in moonstone and some opals.

Depending on where it’s found in the world, labradorite can reflect all sorts of different colors!

But whatever color it is, Labradorite will always be the Best and Coolest Rock.

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The last of the few stones mom picked! This was much more familiar to me since I used 20 gauge gold wire for the base and 24 gauge wire for the pearl and red bead (since that was the only size that would fit through the eye of the bead). I’m not quite sure what the stone is, but it’s a nice forest green! Dad even commented and said it looked like Christmas.

Created 12.02.2018

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Blue calcite wrapped in silver 20 gauge wire for a friend of mine that I made in my writing class! She told me she also enjoyed wire wrapping and the color blue, so I thought it’d be nice to gift her this one!

Created 11.10.2018

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A flourite piece! Mom was very enthusiastic to show me that she’d gotten a large bulk of flourite. Unfortunately the original one that this flourite came from was too big to wrap so I tried breaking stones for the first time! (I’ll make a separate post later.) I really enjoyed this one, the reinforcement of the place where the pendant is threaded through was a big achievement. I’ve been experimenting for awhile to see which was both aesthetically pleasing and more secure! I really enjoyed the color matching i did with this one too.

Created 12.12.2018

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This was another one my mother picked! It was also experimental, but not as much as the copper wire. The wire wrapping around this stone (which I’m also unsure of what it is) was loose, but not as loose as the copper one so it made a more zigzag pattern instead.

Created 12.02.2018

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This was an experimental piece! I actually asked my mother which stones she liked out of my collection as well as what color wire she preferred. I usually work with 20 gauge wire, and this was 24 gauge- so this was much thinner than i was used to. A lot of the wire was fairly loose around the stone (I’m actually very unsure of what this one is) so i twisted the looser wires which ended up making a pretty pattern! The pearl was just a little touch I thought my mom would appreciate :^)

Created 12.02.2018

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Some dragons blood jasper! a classmate of mine commissioned me to do this one! He gave me the stone and i just quickly wrapped it for him over the weekend and gave it to him after class!

Created 11.10.2018

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hello again!! it’s been awhile, my apologies! i’ve still been making these, it’s just been pretty busy lately and i’ve been forgetting to upload. this one was made as a welcome gift for my roommate! she told me she really liked the color orange (even though this is red jasper) and i thought it’d be nice to give her something that i made!

created 09.02.2018

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This one was commissioned by the same friend who liked Steven Universe in my last post! She lost the original one on a trip and was very sad about it, so she asked me to make another one; it has essentially the same elements, except this time I decided to compact it, and didn’t add a Virgo tag- I couldn’t find them anywhere! 

Created 8.30.16

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Ah yes, a few other pieces that I created around Christmas time! The one on the left is a gift and the one on the right was a commissioned one that I disguised as a Christmas gift!

The one on the left was for a new friend I’d made sophomore year-she really liked the show Steven Universe, and the show had to do with personified gems as characters. The main four included a rose quartz, a pearl, an amethyst, a garnet (blue and red; the story goes that the garnet is made of two other gems, a sapphire and a ruby), and a half gem-half human hybrid. She also was a Virgo! And she was also fairly proud of it, so I couldn’t miss putting a little label that said she was a Virgo as well.

The second one as commissioned by a classmate I didn’t really know, but apparently she’d seen and heard about my pieces before (I was and still am beyond shocked and flattered to know this) and I found out her birthday for the tag! I also was originally planning to give it to her as a birthday present, but I found that we might not have any classes together by then due to semester schedule changes. I thought I’d go with something fairly versatile; a clear crystal was always wearable no matter what color, and I figured through what she wore on a daily basis that she really liked cool colors!

Both created 12.16.15

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Oooh, yes, this one was one of my favorite commissions! My friend was looking for some rose quartz pieces in a shop one time, and wasn’t completely pleased with the prices. I guess this wasn’t really a commission, since I offered- I could make them what they needed for free! They needed a pendulum and also some earrings- this was the first pendulum I’d ever created, so I found that very exciting. They really like green, and pink and green are a classic combination, so I decided to add a little touch of green to liven things up a tad! That’s also an opalite on the pendulum (the big one in the middle)- I just thought that it looked very interesting paired with the rose quartz, and they seemed to like the little accent! Created 5.26.16

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This one was for the same friend who got the moonstone necklace! She actually reminds me of pink or gold, but there aren’t exactly any gold rocks (not the correct shade or undertone, that is. It needs to be very warm. Anyway! Sorry for the mini tangent) Her colors are always those of the very soft sunrises or sunsets- think soft pink with blue creeping at the edges, all the clouds tinted purple since they’re sandwiched between the pink and blue. That’s why I chose the glass beads to be blue and purple- but the pearl was because she also loved the sea. The main stone is a rose quartz! It’s rumored to be the stone of love, and I always want to let my friends know how much I love and care for them- what better way then to give her the “love stone”, right?  (This was also a Christmas present! I believe a year-ish later than the moonstone one though) Created 12.22.16

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This is one of my favorites that I’ve ever made! This was a Christmas present for one of my closest friends- the big stone is a rainbow moonstone, and then there’s two glass beads (yellow and green) and a lapis lazuli! I remembered seeing a photo of a really lovely moonstone on this friend’s blog one time and she was commenting discreetly on the post about how much she adored them and how she hoped to find one someday. I happened to have one in my collection, and I really thought this shape was unique as well! I added the yellow and green because it reminded me of some of her physical features; she had “summer bleached hair”, as we agreed, and green eyes (that changed to blue and gray as well). She also adored lapis lazuli, so I thought a little accent bead would also be appreciated and look nice with the other colors, since they are neighbors on the color wheel!

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Both of these were birthday gifts, but for different people!

The first one was for a classmate of mine- I really admired her, since she was mentally very strong and hardworking, and she and I helped each other with a lot of class work. I wanted to give her something to show appreciation of her! I picked vaguely earthy tones since I didn’t feel like I knew her well enough to pinpoint down specific colors, but she was very grounded and level-headed whenever I spoke to her! And of course, the Scorpio symbol since her birthday landed in the Scorpio range. Created 11.15.15

This second one, was for an old middle school friend of mine! She and I were close for some time but we grew apart due to school schedules and being busy with our lives. I never forgot her birthday or her colors, though. She’s a very bright presence, and definitely a personable person as well! She’s been through a lot, and she’s still working hard on herself and her environment. This was in a way, my way of telling her that I loved her brightness (thus the orange) and that her hard work was appreciated, even if no one told her verbally (moss agate is rumored to improve self-esteem as well as create a grounded balance). Created 12.1.15