OMG that fire is insane!! Your son is really doing an amazing job, you must be so proud! I guess you could even say he's... brilliant ๐คฃ
meggied90
joined 1 year ago
You also have a decreased risk of ovarian cancer if you completely remove your fallopian tubes, and it doesn't require an 18.75 year financial, emotional, medical, and time investment to gain.
The faceting community would welcome anyone who wants to create a wine pairing guide for our lickable rocks.
Our girl just had a TPLO in January. The day she comes home, have zero plans and take off work. Your pup will need your companionship because they will feel so traumatized and confused. The next day was a lot better, she was bearing just a little bit of weight.
My dog is always tough and pretends she has no pain, coupled with the pain pills she acted like she could run marathons a week in. It was A LIE and we had to put her on anti anxiety meds to chill her out so she didn't damage her hardware. 12 year old dogs should not have zoomies but she just felt that good. ๐ฉ Don't be shy asking for anti-anxiety meds to mellow your pup out if she's normally an energetic mess. It helps a lot.
Jumping on furniture was also a problem. We ended up putting our mattress on the floor and sleeping there for six weeks so she wouldn't jump on the bed. We also bought dog beds and put her favorite blankets on them in EVERY room to bait her into not jumping. It mostly worked. Mostly.
We're two months in now and she's doing awesome. She had a bad few days last week, after sleeping on it funny, that scared me because she refused to use the leg at first but she just needed time to heal from her self-inflicted discomfort and she's walking normally right now.
You're question has seriously amazing timing. Two weeks ago I would have answered you with "several thousand dollars" because the machines that were on the market are all very expensive.
However, last week a passionate faceter came up with an economic solution for those who don't have thousands to throw at a fancy machine. By modifying an unusable machine from Amazon, you can make it a viable option for faceting and it costs about $500. It will be without bells and whistles but it's perfectly usable.
https://store.turtleshoard.com/pages/cutkit-one-get-started-faceting-for-under-500
The only other thing you would need to budget for is your rough, and that's only expensive if you want it to be. If you have local metaphysical shops near you, they often sell quartz pebbles for like $5 and I faceted several of those as my first stones. ๐
Of course, if you want to try before you buy you could look for a local lapidary club or gem and mineral society in your city - send them an email and ask if they know anyone who teaches faceting. I did this and I was very happy to have the experience!
I have been excitedly waiting for you to post your moissanite results!! It's gorgeous, excellent work! That sparkle is really something isn't it?
I'm not actually sure. Typically faceting uses water to keep the stone cool while grinding. The water would dissolve the sugar and the friction heat would melt and move the candy ever so slightly so I'd never get a perfect polish or accurate meetpoints. If an oil coolant was used, I'm not sure the stone would be edible after... And that doesn't even touch on what a nightmare it would be to clean sugar out of my equipment.
Conceptually, with a lot of foresight, you might be able to do a really crappy faceting of a piece of candy. Realistically it's a nightmare idea and an expensive mess.
I can confirm it it does NOT taste like one!! ๐ญ
Okay not really! It's just nanosital, which is a synthetic material very similar to glass. Gemstones always look alarmingly tasty, but this one was so reminiscent of a green Jolly Rancher when I polished it that I just had to give it an appropriate staging.
Design is "Green Lion" by Scott Laborie - several other faceters had been talking about this design as one of their favorites and after cutting it, I can see why! Strongly recommended by me now as well :) 24.0 cts, 19.6 x 12.7 mm
(Only one Jolly Rancher was harmed in the making of this photo op)
Spinny video can be found here, if you want to see it in sparkly action (and a nice proportionate girdle): https://pxlmo.com/p/meggied90/675122420686447993
Jjjjooooiiiinnnn uuuussss ๐งโโ๏ธ
It's not a silly question at all ๐ faceting is one of those rare hobbies to stumble across in the real world.
For perspective, this stone took me about 8 hours to cut, so this little comment probably makes the execution sound simpler than it is. Most faceters use a diagram to cut which tells them the precise angle as well as location on the the stone to cut that angle.
We glue our uncut stone to a stick, called a "dop", to attach it to our angle machine.
We have spinning discs, called "laps" that are basically like sandpaper but made with diamonds instead of sand. When we cut the stone we start at very low grit laps which will cut fast but leave behind deep, rough scratches, then we progress to finer and finer grit laps until the diamond scratches are so microscopic that to a 10x magnification the stone still looks flawlessly polished.
We do this grinding technique to one half of the stone at a time, typically the pavilion (the backside of the gem) first and then the crown (top half) second.
Crylos has actually posted a much more in depth how-to earlier in this community if you want to drive deeper into the rabbit hole of faceting.
In this stone, the frosted facets are actually un-polished areas of the stone, so the snowflake you see is actually very fine scratches that aren't bouncing light correctly, creating the "line" appearance. There's multiple facets on the crown, so it is bouncing the "line" appearance through different angles, making it look way more complex than it actually is.
Here's a photo of the frosting lines on the pavilion. Deceptively simple compared to what you see on the final product, isn't it? ๐คญ
I saw another faceter experimenting with frosting the edges between facets and the result was so intriguing I decided to copy the idea. It created such a cool snowflake effect in this aquamarine!
I finally have a gem that is showcased better as a still photo than a video. ๐คฏ
5.94 cts, 10.78mm
Design (unfrosted) is Sparkle Six by Wayne Emery (can be found on the USFG website)
Just finished faceting this monster over the weekend. This thing was so dang easy to polish it felt a little suspicious if I am being perfectly honest. Overall I am extremely happy with my results. Even the girdle!
12.3 cts, 12.4mm, design is Jumper by Arya Akhavan. The rough was acquired from Tom's Box of Rocks.
For synthetics I have two go-to vendors.
https://store.turtleshoard.com Turtle's Hoard stocks a lot of weird, interesting, science-y facet worthy materials. The Christmas Garnet is worth a gander, I've got a piece of that I'm holding on to for a rainy day.
https://www.etsy.com/shop/TomsBoxofRocks Tom sells more "traditional" synthetic material, like corundum, CZ, and nanosital. He has a lot and you can find some cool color change and bicolor versions. I find his corundum is competitively priced with Joe Henley so check them both when you're shopping.
I had this vendor recommended to me by my mentor, and recently bought from him: https://www.westerngem.com His website doesn't display well on mobile, the pictures rearrange in strange ways, it's better with a desktop browser. He sent me a complimentary citrine when I placed my last (rather large) order. Everything was exactly as described and the topaz was even more blue than the picture suggested!
Amethyst (unknown location), 2.085 carats, 8x1 mm x 5.8 mm, design is Spellbound by Jeff Rhonemus.
A few months back I was at a gem show, and a vendor was selling large bags of amethyst stones for very cheap, as she thought they were all unusable junk. I bought the lot and I don't agree with the vendor - I think about half the stones do have facet material in them, they just need some trimming.
This stone is one of those "junk" amethysts, after removing the cloudy parts of it. There is one inclusion you can see in the video: as it rotates away there is a line that looks like a hair inside the top right corner. I consider it a pretty trivial inclusion, since you can barely see it straight on.
Unfortunately, I forgot to take a photo of the stone before cutting off the cloudy parts. Here is an example of some other rocks from the bag that I think might have hidden potential too (ignore the silver sharpie on some):
(Sorry not sorry for the Skyrim reference in the title, I just picked the game up again after a long hiatus and it seemed fitting.)
Fire opal, 0.335 carats, Princess Trilliant by A. Collins
This tiny beauty has quite a few mistakes in it, if you look past the pretty sparkles.
As soon as I started cutting the crown, the thing flew off my dop and clear across the room! The landing caused some minor chips on the pavilion, one of which is extremely obvious in the video.
I did my best trying to realign the thing but it took several attempts, and even with my best effort it was not quite right. My girdle is not level, and several of my meet points don't actually meet.
I wanted to share this one so any other newbs or aspiring faceters don't feel intimidated by all of our beautiful cuts - we make mistakes too! Sometimes many of them all at once, and we spend hours coming up with as many curse words as we can think of while we're trying to fix them! But even this dumpster fire turned out rather pretty, all things considered. :)
And when I say this thing is tiny, I really mean it. American penny for scale:
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Can mosquitos even suck blood from a leech? I feel like blood probably doesn't taste as good when it's secondhand.