Christmas Chrysoprase

Happy holidays all you rockin folks!

I made this chrysoprase ring for Christmas for my wife so I thought I'd share it here. It's only the second ring I've made so I'm very happy with the outcome.

The stone is some Chrysoprase I picked up at Quartzsite last year. It was hard to get a good, cleanish stone from the rough chunk. There was lots of soft red matrix and black dendrites to work around. I honestly struggled a lot cutting this cab. I typically cut cabs like most of the ones you see posted here, with a gradually sloping dome and well defined girdle. But with the translucent stone, I wanted to have a high dome and minimal girdle to give it depth and a deeper color. Although it's a chalcedony, the shape made it work very differently on the wheels, I think because the smaller stone and high dome made for only a small surface area in contact with the wheels at a time. Typically all the flat spots are out after the 220 soft wheel, and absolutely after the 600 soft. But I was pulling my hair out getting flat spots on the 600. I eventually just ran it through the 1200 and 3000. Surprisingly the 3000 smoothed everything out. Super weird!

I love how the color changes in the sunlight, and depending on direction, I'd have a very hard time telling it apart from gem silica.










After seeing my saw pictures being used on FB I decided to add a watermark to these pictures to hopefully deter scammers lol.

Thanks again to opalpyrexia for suggesting the Eve silicone polishing attachments for the Foredom. By starting to use a Foredom and those attachments on the last few pieces I've made, it's significantly improved the quality of work and eliminated most of the laborious hand sanding.

Thanks for looking!