Fun stuff with old diamonds.

Charles and Diane had lots of used diamonds which they had been collecting from auctions. The diamonds were an assortment of sizes and fit nicely into the earring design shown above. If you look closely you will notice that the center stones are different sizes, but who will notice with a head put between them!

Diamond Dealers....dammit!

You get what you pay for.
I should just stop there and go get some sleep but I wont! So you are making cinnamon buns for a living, and so are two other people on your street. Now how do you get and keep your part of the market share and thus stay in business??? Well I know 2 (legal) ways, 1. sell a cheaper bun, if you add fewer expensive raisins then you can drop your price. And 2. sell a better bun, if you stuff the bun with juicy fruit and smear cream cheese icing all over the top you can probably sell them at a higher price.
Now imagine that the Bakery Mafia have regulated the requirements for cinnamon buns, and to be called a 'Cinnibun' the dough must weigh a certain amount, a minimum of raisins must be added and a maximum sweet gooey cheese quota has been tabulated....and now we have the diamond industry.
I can buy a 60pt, GH colour, SI2 clarity, round diamond for a variety of prices, because some dealers carry stones that barely make the grade and other take pride in selling stones that are almost too good. Dealers cant fudge the weight, the scale says what the scale says...but maybe the cut isn't as well proportioned so you spend money on a fat girdle which means the stone is a little smaller in appearance, maybe it looks like a 57pt instead. Luckily the guy selling fat stones charges less so the price between the well cut 57pt and the mediocre cut 60pt are probably the same.
Colour is judged with the diamond laying table down and the stone is compared against tinted cubic zirconias...then how come the diamond can be graded differently by two different appraisers? Because the companies that create the cubic zirconias don't use the same grading scale. A sad joke in the business is " Buy an 'I' and sell an 'H'". But the most interesting difference is in clarity, and that's because I can see a colour difference to the naked eye, I can see a badly cut stone, but I cant count all the specks - I can see the amount of dough, I can see the cream cheese but I cant count the raisins. The minimum is 8 raisins per bun, the maximum is 25, and this is where my cinnibun analogy fails because I think more raisins is better but fewer specks (inclusions) in your diamond is better...I guess you have to pretend you hate raisins.... Anyway, some diamond dealers sell the minimum and others the max, and this is reflected in the price. So like i said, you get what you pay for....which leads to my next post, 'If a deal seems to good to be true, it is'.

Diane's Ring

Well Christmas has come and gone again. Its a stressful time in the jewellery business, our busiest season, which is one of the reasons I havent been writing - too busy to rant! The ring pictured above was one of my favorites this Christmas. Chuck and Diane showed up with a collection of rings they had bought at auction and a picture of what they would like...seems easy right? Actually it wasnt bad, but its very important to discuss potential 'unhappinesses' before they happen. The diamonds were of different qualities and colours, after looking at the stones it was decided that it was more important to match 3 stones by colour than clarity because clarity is judged under 10 power magnification and colour we judge with the naked eye. So I could see a colour difference but not see a clarity difference. The next hurdle was altering the ring design to fit the diamonds but keep as close to the feel of the picture. The diamonds in the original picture were not as graduated in size, so the altered design has a step down between the center stone and the side stones, and then to continue the pattern we stepped down from the side stones to the band. This also brought the band down to a width that Diane was comfortable with. The side profile, the part that Chuck liked best, was not altered by the changes.

Karen's Ring

Karen wanted a petite ring for her beautiful diamond. Its a new cut from the Diavik mine, its like a princess cut but without the corners. I don't know what to call it but it sure was pretty! Handmade in 18K white gold.

A speck of sand managed to enter an oysters shell ,and to protect itself from the irritant the oyster coated it with nacre. After many years, the heavily coated sand grain has become a rare and precious commodity, a natural salt water pearl.
Then man figured out how to add a round shell bead into the poor mollusk and wait a few years for the oyster to coat it, thus creating cultured salt water pearls, the better the pearl, the longer it was left undisturbed in the oyster.
Remember those little rice grain pearls that everyone was wearing in the 80's? Those are freshwater pearls, started from a grain of sand irritating a different type of mollusk, some sort of lake dwelling critter, and forcing it to create a Natural freshwater pearl.
Now we have figured out how to put a shell bead into fresh water mollusks too and in a few years we have another kind of pearl, Fresh water cultured pearls.
Natural saltwater pearls are rare and expensive, cultured freshwater are cheap and plentiful.
Now's when it gets interesting, you take a big natural freshwater pearl and grind it into a round bead and put it into a saltwater oyster. After a few years you pull it out and what do you have? A gemology problem.
Usually you can tell if pearls are cultured or not by x-raying them because you see a bead inside rather than years of layers of nacre. But when you x-ray a saltwater pearl with a freshwater core it looks like a natural saltwater pearl. Supposedly you can tell the difference if you break the pearl in half...but now it has no value. I can't see any Appraiser smashing a pearl necklace to pieces and then saying "yup they were natural saltwater pearls" and still having a job.
So provenance is important these days. Grandma's pearls, are worth more than a brand new strand...if they were well cared for. So if Granny never sprayed them with perfume, cleaned all her skin oils off them after wearing them and had them restrung regularly they could be worth more than you imagine!

Kathy's Ring

I can thing of anything to say except 'Wow, this was fun'. Kathy doesn't live in the Lower Mainland, I have yet to meet her, it made this ring a challenge - couldn't have done it without the Internet! First we talked about what jewellery she already wears and why she likes it. Then about her finger shape and what would work best for her. Then we doodled, and counter doodled and the doodled some more until I felt it was time to go 3-D and I mailed her some wax versions of her ring to her to try. She mailed me back the one she liked and then using it as a guide I handmade her ring in 18k yellow and white gold.

Something that bugs me....

How come we can call 10k metal 10k gold?
I mean its less than 1/2 gold...if I bought peanut butter that had less than 50% peanuts in it I would worry about what that other stuff was.....and should i really be eating it.