Magical Mystery Mining Tour!

We traveled hundreds of miles around Oregon, including at least 100 of them offroad, to get to the places where we find the gemstones for you! New gemstones, like fresh Sunstones and Owyhee Blue Picture Jasper, will be hitting the saws, faceting, and cab machines to reveal unique stones for amazing jewelry pieces. The trip ignited creative impulses and we came home with many new cutting and jewelry ideas. We’ll be writing a Blog about this, and some of the materials are already being revealed on YOUTUBE. Stay tuned to see these pretties landing in the Store soon!

Blue jasper dreams

It’s been a long standing dream to venture out to where the Owyhee Blue Picture Jasper can be found. In years past, attempts were stymied by foul weather and vehicular drawbacks. This year weather threatened to foil our plan again, but in a stroke of meteorological luck, a few dry days in a row afforded the extreme back country foray into the frontier of Blue Jasper. It’s incredible how the graphics in the stones themselves echo the stunning beauty of the landscapes they come from. Videos will be released on Youtube of the travels and of course the stones will appear in jewelry available in the STORE.

friday night lives!

Every Friday Night at 6pm Pacific Time, we go live on YouTube to discuss all the fun of the week (the latest taking an adventure under the microscope!). You’ll see if we’ve been preparing rough stones, cutting slabs, making cabochons, faceting gems, creating jewelry, mining stones, rockhounding or whatever zaniness we’ve been cooking up. We often have guests on to discuss rock/gem/mineral/creating topics and you’re welcome to join the chat for questions in real time or to lend your wisdom to the discussion. Check out Ozone Fine ArtVentures and make sure to subscribe or become a member to never miss out on the videos and livestreams there.

Sunstone Anomaly

From our latest haul of Sunstones from the Spectrum Mine, we had several exciting stones reveal themselves. Sorting has to be done to separate the colored gems from the schiller from the champagne, etc. When a good stone is spied, one can get a better look using a jeweler’s loupe to magnify the stone. We’re looking for the color, clarity, inclusions and lack of fractures to make it a facet candidate. When this green tinted stone was viewed in the loupe, it contained tiny black dots of which I hadn’t seen before. This begged for a microscope view, so under it went, and this is the view at about 50x. See the crazy dark spikes, V’s and X’s? Usually there are just platelets of copper in the stones, with maybe an occasional tiny bit of basalt trapped. We’ll be working on cracking the mystery of this stone, meanwhile it’s a marvel to gaze at!

Membership fun

Over on Youtube, we also have a membership side of the channel where extra content is placed (the latest is a video of harbor seals at Yaquina Head!). If you enjoy watching the process side of the jewelry and lapidary, that kind of video content will be on the membership side of the channel. We will also post extra footage and special previews from upcoming videos as a special thanks for your support. If you’re interested check out OzoneFineArt-Ventures where you can see all the regular videos and livestreams, and can sign up to be a member for less than a cup of coffee a month. All the proceeds go to funding the platforms to launch the livestreams and items to bring you video from our adventures (like cameras, mics, editing programs, memory, etc.). Thanks for your support!

New studio mate

Welcome our newest member of the family. If you recall, the last addition was also a Beta named Earl (the Pearl). We accidentally went into a shop and had to rescue this dear little Beta girl from that terrible little cup they keep them in. Don’t worry, we won’t put them in together, they have separate tanks. She’s a ‘Galaxy Beta’ and my mom called her Zona. She’s a spicy fishy that is fun to watch while the creative inspirations are waiting to strike. What do you do to get inspired? Anything fishy?

We’d all love to hear from you, Contact Us with any inquiries of comments you may have and sign up for the mailing list so that we can keep in touch. Cheers!