Many Faceted

The Gemologist is IN.

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The gemologist is IN.

Well, I survived my weekend of gemstone ID at the Gem, Jewelry & Mineral Show. Actually, I more than survived… I had a great time! I saw a variety of stones, and there were only one or two that I couldn’t firmly identify, both due to the stone’s setting not allowing me to get a good refractive index reading. (Definitely, loose stones are easier to work with.)

Among the many things I saw:

  • A gentleman with an amazing collection of raw diamonds, in every crystal form — octahedron, cubic, and even some macles (a flat triangular diamond; a twinned crystal. Extremely difficult to cut, as the planes of weakness change direction halfway through, due to the twinning.)
  • A trillion-cut synthetic alexandrite, BEAUTIFULLY cut.
  • A rock crystal quartz gem with one of the brightest, nicest bull’s-eye interference figures I’ve ever seen. The bull’s-eye only occurs in quartz; it positively identifies the species. (It was supposed to be a topaz. I bought it off the owner, for my own collection.)
  • A strand of “jade” beads, that were actually quench-crackled, dyed quartz. (Oops. Well, this wasn’t the AGTA show, was it…)
  • A lot of blue topaz. Got pretty quick with the topaz ID…
  • A really amazing cluster of phenakite crystals (which I managed to get onto the refractometer without breaking anything.)

It was a blast to talk to people about their stones and jewelry, and make new acquaintances — stone dealers, and even a fellow gemologist! I’ll definitely do it again next year.

Graduate Gemologist

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It’s official! As of 4:45 pm (ish) today, I have passed my 20-stone exam, and I can rightfully call myself a Graduate Gemologist. (It is very surreal, typing that.)

It’s hard to know what to say. Earlier in the afternoon, as I was driving, I imagined how it would feel to have passed my exam. How happy I would be! When I got the call, I was astonished that I had actually PASSED — on the first try. (I still can hardly believe it.) I was cheering aloud, and then bursting into tears, over and over. I called people, texted people, told Facebook and Twitter… and went through a surge of emotions every single time I gave the news. It’s been a long three years. Hard to believe it’s at an end!

Now I have to figure out what to do next, which is a bit sobering. But it doesn’t have to be today. I’m going to savor this victory a bit longer, before I come back down to earth. GIA won’t give out exact figures, but very few people pass the 20-stone on the first try. (Please excuse me while I explode with glee.)

I’m a Graduate Gemologist!!!

The 20-stone exam

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Today, I took my 20-stone final exam for Gem Identification. If I pass, I’ll officially be a Graduate Gemologist! (If not, see you again in two weeks… same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.)

I’ve been increasingly anxious about the exam, ever since the materials shipped on Thursday. There’s no way to “study” as such, although I did write up an index of stones I’ve seen, and mark my lab manual appropriately. When I got up this morning, I wasn’t sure how to feel, but I took myself and all my equipment down to the local community college. (My proctor is the geology professor there, my long-time friend Dr. Bill Hirt.)

I took the test in two three-hour blocks (10 stones each), with a lunch break in between. Overall, I think I did pretty well. I was able to get through each set of stones with plenty of time to review my worksheet. (At first, it took me six to eight hours to grade a box of twenty stones. I completed my exam in slightly over four hours, which feels pretty good.)

I hope to get my results on Wednesday or Thursday. Will post again when I know!

Nearing the end…

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The last box!This weekend, I finished the very last stone box for Gem Identification. (Waiting for it to be graded now.) It’s a little hard to believe, after all this time, that I’m so close to getting my diploma… okay, really hard to believe. It’s been a little over three years since I started my distance education coursework at GIA, and as soon as I pass this last box, I’ll be ready to take the 20-stone final. (I whined about described this earlier.)

I’ll be able to take the final this month. It’s possible that I could take and pass the final this month. After that, I’ll officially be a Graduate Gemologist! (This is very surreal.)

400 stones identified

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Examining an unknown stone for Gem Ident…100 more to go, for a total of 500 stones. Or, if you’d rather hear it in boxes, I’ve finished my 20th box, with five more left. I have one more in-hand, four yet to be delivered. I admit, reaching this milestone makes finishing Gemstone Identification seem more… feasible. I’ll have nearly six months to pass the final. (Hopefully, that’s way more time than I’ll need.)

Yep, they're all... RED.I’m in the home stretch now, which means the helpful stone-by-stone video tutorials have gone away. [sigh] I have one or two more boxes where I can miss up to one stone; the last few allow for no errors. Which is fine, that’s how the final is too (all-or-none).

Let me explain the final. You get twenty stones, and six hours to identify them. If you misidentify any stone, you fail. If you correctly identify a stone, but write the identification in the wrong part of the box, you fail. You can retake the final… but they send a different box of stones.

(Are we having fun yet??)

So that’s what’s in store for me, hopefully in late January. At this point, I just want to get it over with, get my Graduate Gemologist diploma and be DONE. It’s not lack of interest — actually, I really enjoy Gem Ident — but the homework “deadline” has gotten old, and I’m tired of worrying about it.

I’ll post again later this week with some new jewelry pieces, once I get a commission delivered. (My jewelry-making stint was unexpectedly brief, will resume in January. The short version: my work schedule sucks. The end.)

Turning over a new… facet?

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So it occurs to me that I’ve only posted five times this year. No good excuse for that, really. Is anyone still reading? [crickets]

I can’t seem to find a theme I like, my topics bounce around… well, let’s face it, I’d rather fiddle with the stylesheet than write a post. I like thinking about writing posts, but no posts actually get written. I still like posting jewelry pictures though, so my Pinterest boards are reasonably active. I’ve started two “visual archive” type blogs, on ancient and antique jewelry, as a sort of miniature, self-hosted Pinterest. (For a few reasons. Read about them here.)

Since last we met, I took a wonderful class on carving wax models for casting (which I didn’t blog about), and have had the past two months off my jewelry lessons, as my teacher was on the road (nothing to blog about.) I have finished a few more stone boxes for Gem Ident (blog-worthy), and have a goal to be done with the boxes by early January (highly blog-worthy, should it occur as scheduled.) I have my eye on several museum exhibition catalogs, as there’s a lot of amazing jewelry exhibits on, mostly in places I’m unable to visit (questionably blog-worthy?)

I expect to start making jewelry pieces for sale this fall/winter, once I have access to a workshop again. I am taking commissions on a very limited basis (limited by time — I have very little of it.) For now, I work in sterling silver, with the loveliest stones I can get my hands on. I really need to revive my Etsy and list my resin pieces there, if there’s interest. (Hint: comment if interested.)

A note for subscribers: I have changed the subscribe-to-posts email service, so if you got two of these emailed to you, please keep the MailChimp one and unsubscribe from the other one. (The new one has a pretty amethyst graphic at the top.) If you only got the WordPress one, please unsubscribe, and fill in the form again here on the site to get on the new list. Finally, if you got this blog post and aren’t sure why, you joined a mailing list for my jewelry business, and I have combined two lists into one. (I promise not to post so often as to be annoying, but if this isn’t what you want to read, please feel free to unsubscribe.)

Design Class, Gemology, etc

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Some finished design sketches from Design class, February 2013
Some finished design sketches from Design class, February 2013

I meant to do a whole post on the Design class I took at Revere Academy last month, and lookie here, it’s a month later. Oops. To sum up, I had a great weekend in San Francisco, learned a lot, loved the school, and I can’t wait to take another class there, once they reopen at their new location (conveniently, across the street from their old location!)

I did a lot of drawing in two days, much more than I’m accustomed to, and it felt good to put ink to paper, in quantity, without caring (much) about the result (which was the point, to get ideas out without too much inner-critique.) I learned a bit about jewelry rendering — how to shade, how to make metal look like metal, etc. There’s two classes that go far more in-depth into rendering, both with dry and wet media. We made “jewelry” out of foil, designed things based on patterns in nature, and learned about generating original ideas, and documenting the idea development process. Useful stuff!

What else? I’ve been working with wire lately, studying two instructional DVDs from Wire-Sculpture.com. So far I’ve made an all-wire bracelet (like a cuff, but with a clasp), and a wire-work cabochon ring. My one picture of those is pretty lousy; I’ll take another one soon.

I just finished box #22 in Gemstone ID; I have 14 more boxes to go (280 stones), which means I’m almost halfway through the 500 stones I will examine throughout the course. There’s a lot left, but at the same time, I’ve seen a lot already! (Over 200!)

Unrelated (yet sortof related), I retired from my spaceflight blog this week, and in a way, Many Faceted has become my personal blog. I’m documenting my various gem/jewelry pursuits and adventures, and it’s fun to share! (I’ll be launching another jewelry blog soon, more research and article-oriented.)

Thanks for reading, and for anyone who came over from Silver Rockets, hello and welcome!

PS: When did this site get so pink? Can you tell I haven’t looked at it in a bit? LOL

Now we’re cooking with gas!

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My new gemological microscope!
My new gemological microscope!

Not quite in time for Christmas, but certainly in time for my next stone box: I finally own a microscope! Not the best microscope in the universe, but it’s great for a start. Already it’s making my schoolwork so much easier….

A citrine in my stoneholder
A citrine in my stoneholder

Starting Gem Identification

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My first box of stones!A few weeks ago, I started Gem Identification, the last class I need for my Graduate Gemologist degree. Over the span of the class, I will receive a total of 500 gemstones to analyze at home, using my own lab equipment. (20 stones per box, 25 boxes.) This culminates in the final, a 20-stone “all or none” challenge, where I have six hours to correctly identify 20 stones. “All or none” means exactly what it says – if I miss one stone, I fail. (I can retake it, but it will be with another box of stones, which will probably be completely different.)

I have the required set of equipment (10x loupe, refractometer, polariscope, spectroscope, dichroscope, tweezers, flashlight to stare into), plus a short-wave/long-wave UV lamp (which is great fun for making things fluoresce. Like diamonds. Or cool rocks.) The one piece of equipment that isn’t required, which I’ll probably get eventually, is a microscope. It has better indirect lighting (“darkfield” lighting), making it easier to see things inside the stone that are low-relief. (Some of those things can tell you whether the stone is natural or synthetic, for instance. Important stuff!)

I received my first box of stones on July 20. This box is used with the first several lessons, to help train you in using the various pieces of lab equipment. The stones in box 1 are chosen to show good/obvious examples of various things: a characteristic spectrum, or obvious features visible with magnification, or a specific reaction under the polariscope. After learning about the instruments, I analyzed and correctly identified all twenty stones. (The course gives a lot of helpful hints.)

After I “passed” this box, I sent it back, and am waiting for the next one to arrive. (Cue Jeopardy music.)

So far I’m really enjoying the course. I’ve always liked “lab” better than “lecture” — I guess I’m the hands-on type? — and it’s fun to get a stone to reveal it’s secrets…. I can’t wait to get my next box!