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Our stones

The stone comes first.

We buy the rough and haul it home ourselves, then cut it here in the shop.

The material leads from there. We read the slab, follow what the pattern is doing, and let the stone decide what it becomes.

Racks of bins in the shop filled with rough and slabbed turquoise, chrysocolla and jasper, with more slab pieces on the shelf above.
The store: rough and slabs.
A Sonoran sunrise slab on the shop cutting mat, a band of orange red cuprite cutting through blue green chrysocolla, the mat ruler running up the left edge.
A second Sonoran sunrise slab on the same gridded mat, broader fields of blue green chrysocolla with orange red cuprite running corner to corner.
Sonoran sunrise off the saw: cuprite red against chrysocolla blue and green, on the cutting mat where it was measured.

From the ground to the finished piece

Four stages, one roof.

Almost nobody does both halves of this trade. A stone is normally cut in one shop and set in another. Ours are cut and set here.

  1. Rough

    Rock comes home by the bag and by the trailer load. We read it before anything else: what it is, and where it came from.

  2. Slab

    The saw opens the rough into slabs. The first cut is where a stone tells you what it is going to be.

  3. Cabochon

    The wheel shapes and domes the stone, then polishes it until the surface holds the light.

  4. Finished piece

    The stone is set in silver handcrafted at the bench, and the piece is finished by hand.

Jeremy runs most of the cutting, at the saw and the wheel. Les does most of the faceting, the setting and the metalwork. Both of them cross over when a piece asks for it.

A wild fire jasper slab, deep red and brown with a pale agate edge, lying on the grey cutting mat and measured against its ruler grid.
A slab on the docket, measured and logged.

In the collection now

What is on the bench today.

The counts follow the collection, so a stone listed here is a stone you can ask about.

One piece each: Petrified and fossil wood. See those pieces

See the collection

A hand holding a thin crazy lace agate slab up to the sun outdoors, daylight coming through pale blue and grey lace banding inside a white and ochre rind.
Crazy lace agate, held up to the afternoon light.

Reading a stone

Hold it up to the light.

A slab tells you most of what it is with the sun behind it. You can see how deep the pattern runs, where the stone is clear, and where it is likely to give way.

That is the read we do before anything is cut, and it is the same one we will do for you.

Ask about any stone