This is your flash reporter from inside the tourmaline temple in Mars Pa. The outside of this sacride place looks much like any other small two story red house with a big front porch and a flat roofed dormer built in 192 ,but inside the emotions of hundreds of...
With working on my site and the pandemic’s disruption of available blue tourmaline rough, my tourmaline world has become more uncertain and less productive. Still I want to share a long awaited color event that helps keep me on the quest for more beauty in...
Chipping One of the most disappointing failures that can happen while cutting a tourmaline gem is for the culet or keel to chip. This can happen after you have partially polished the pavilion or while cutting the pavilion. Which varieties of tourmaline are prone to...
At age 15, in 1962, I purchased my first faceting machine. I cut a relatively small number of mixed varieties of gems into my twenties. Running out of money for the hobby and facing many other obligations for my time, I did not facet again until a little over 20 years...
Some relationships are not worth pursuing and other ones will stand the test of time. In 2020, the year of the virus, it became very difficult to obtain rough from the only supplier that has weathered all the storms for twenty years. I hungered for work and a breath...
I have had an interest in rocks and minerals for as long as I can remember, but I really did not get into tourmaline until I started faceting at the age of fifteen. My parents had gotten me a big chemistry set for Christmas and my mother had concerns. I was having too...
Recent Comments