This month, I took my first-ever lapidary class at The Gem Cutters Guild of Baltimore. What is lapidary, you ask? It is the art and process of taking a stone or mineral and turning it into a decorative piece, including cabochons and faceted gems.
Last year, I started thinking more about why I hadn't been incorporating stones into my work. Initially, I thought I just wasn’t interested in stones and that they weren’t my kind of jewelry. In reality, I think I just couldn’t figure out how to work with stones in a way that felt authentic to my design style. I came to the conclusion that if I wanted to work with stones, I needed to learn how to cut them myself, so the shapes and profiles would align with my Sarah Cecelia aesthetic.
But before we can get there, we all have to start somewhere. For me, that start was the Lapidary 1.0 class. This class is required in order to take more advanced classes in the future, as well as become a member of the guild, which grants access to their open studio hours.
The objective of the class was to make three finished cabochons using three different stones in three different shapes. We learned how to cut the stone slabs down to rough shape using a saw and then form the cabochon itself on a lapidary machine called a Genie. The stones I used were porcelain jasper, obsidian, and Montana agate.
If I’m being honest, I knew that what we were learning wasn’t exactly what I want to achieve in future designs. An oversized, domed cabochon isn’t really my style aesthetically. But I did find the process of turning rough stone into a finished piece deeply satisfying, and that helped me answer the question of whether or not this is a rabbit hole I even want to go down (spoiler alert: I do!).
On the second day of the class, we had a couple of hours at the end to play around and use our new skills to explore the materials. I really wanted to try making smaller cuts that resembled my own style more closely. I brought a jade Gua Sha tool with me that I had accidentally broken a few months ago and wanted to experiment with. I attempted to cut small pieces in shapes closer to my canal studs, with flat planes instead of the dome shape typical of cabochons.
The cabbing machine I was working on isn’t exactly suited to this type of design (a flat lap machine is what I actually needed), but I was able to roughly achieve what I was attempting. Now, I have three little gemstones to play around with. I plan to use them to practice making a bezel for them in wax using the build-up method.
Moving forward, I will definitely take more classes now that I’ve completed the prerequisite. There’s an Intarsia class next month at the guild that I would love to take, but it doesn’t work with my schedule this time around. However, I’ll keep an eye out for when it’s offered again. In the meantime, I’m poking around on Marketplace and in lapidary groups on Facebook for used slab saws and flat laps to continue this exploration. Stay tuned!