Garneteed to Love it!
Would you guess there was a jewel inside this pebble? You never know what beautiful gem awaits, until you cut it. Here we have a Garnet from river gravel in Montana, do you think there’s enough to facet a jewel out of this little guy?
The first step is to cut the bottom, or the pavilion, of the stone. It’s tricky with a small stone, to find the shape that will use the most of the available stone and avoid any fractures or unwanted inclusions. In this case, we’re cutting a round. The pebble started out pretty round due to the river tumbling.
A series of diamond encrusted laps are used to form and then pre-polish the chosen shape. Once the pavilion cuts are done, the middle part of the stone called the Girdle is established. Keep in mind, this is a 2mm dop, so we’re removing miniscule amounts from this stone to get these pretty angles going.
Once all that work is done, the garnet can complete the pre-polish stages and move on to the polishing of the pavilion. It’s always so fun to see the rich and delightful the colors that emerge at this stage. This garnet is leaning more towards blushing red wine hues, or a Rhodolite color as opposed to the very crimson red that can occur in some of the garnets.
When the Pavilion is finished and polished, the stone needs to be transferred from the dop holding the stone, to a dop that will hold the pavilion (like an ice cream cone) so that the top or crown of the stone can be cut and polished. Here we see the completion of the crown and the ‘table’, which is the flat top of the stone. So far so good!
After the crown is polished, it’s time to free the gem from the dop and find out just how gorgeous it is! This is the most exciting part and it never gets old. This pretty little gemstone ended up being around 4.5mm, so forgive me for the somewhat blurry shot here. I guess the dazzling colors from the jewel confused my camera eye a bit. I’m also overjoyed to get that much stone out of that little pebble, I think we did great.
it’s exciting to plan the piece of jewelry this wonderful jewel will star in. This cut is Arya Akhavan’s design, Ruination, which is a unique round cut that maximizes the amount of material you have to work with. I have a blog coming up soon that explains the dop transfer procedure (due to popular demand) and keep an eye out for this Garnet to turn up soon in a piece. Cheers!
