Journal

I wanted to write to you a little about one of my top 5 stones, possibly top three though the order may change. I’m talking about opals! The other tops are moonstones and tourmalines but those are for another day. Though opals (and tourmalines) are October’s birthstones, why should we limit ourselves? Opals for everyone.   What I love about the opal is I find it near impossible to be having a bad day, gaze into its dancing rainbow palette, and not feel some spark of joy. I’d go as far as saying it’s a small form of therapy. Please...

                Today I’m honoring and celebrating the mighty sapphire, birthstone of September. I’ve come to use sapphires more and more in my work as I love the range of colors available and the hardness of it–making it a perfect stone for every day wear.  You may have thought, like many do, that sapphires can only be a rich deep blue color. There have been many famous and highly prized sapphires of this color for sure but that leaves out the rest of the rainbow. These stones can be any color–except for red, these...

                            If you’ve been following along you’ll know I don’t highlight every birthstone...I’m not all that into being assigned a stone! I’ll choose my own thanks! But since we find ourselves in August and peridot just feels special to me somehow, I thought I’d dive in and also share some of my peridot pieces. You probably know peridot by its distinct limey/grassy green color and that’s because it doesn’t come in any other! It’s one of the only stones that forms in just the one color, blasting...

Hello Friend! I come to you today with a little talk of silver…in my last blog post I shared all about karat golds so I thought it was only fair to give silver a spotlight too.  Silver is a bit simpler as you really only see sterling silver used in jewelry. But what is it? This jewelry is stamped ‘925” because it is 92.5% silver. The other 7.5% is usually copper, added to give strength to the metal. It would be too soft for jewelry otherwise.  Now sometimes you can find other metals mixed in to mitigate the tarnishing quality...

It's easy to forget sometimes that what you know isn’t what everyone knows–I realized this recently as I struck up a conversation with a new friend about gold purity. I’m essentially talking about the difference between 14k gold and 22k gold and what exactly a karat is anyway.  To begin at the beginning–what is a karat? It is a unit for measuring the purity of gold. 24 karats is pure gold–there is no higher karat than that! This means if you slice a pie into 24 wedges, all of them are pure gold. My kind of pie! You might be...