Welcome to my newsletter! And Welcome Spring!

I love spring; it is my favorite season, filled with promise, colors and expanding times of blue sky and sunshine. My mood improves, and my creativity grows along with it. I hope you too are feeling energized with the changing season.

In this issue, we will begin to explore the wonderful world of agates. I will also talk about my love of piercing, in particular behind stones. What is piercing, you ask? Read on and find out!

Barbara Kay Jewelry News

I was recently approved as a vendor for Dennis 7 Dee’s Nursery’s (formerly Shorty’s) “Spring Makers Market”. This will be a fun event! If you live in the Clark County, Washington – or even Portland, Oregon – area, come see me. You’ll have a chance to enjoy plants as well as a variety of handmade items. Here are the specifics:

Date: Saturday, April 20, 2024
Time: 10AM-4PM
Place: Dennis’ 7 Dees Vancouver Garden Center (10006 SE Mill Plain, Vancouver, WA)

Stone of the Month: The humble, yet oh so beautiful and varied Agate

I love agates. Agates have an incredible range of colors and patterns, as you can see in the very small selection above. And it is a fairly hard stone, so it’s great for jewelry – both for creating with it and for wearing it.

Agate is a type of chalcedony. Chalcedony is a broad name for materials composed of microcrystalline quartz; both agate and jasper are in this group. Microcrystalline quartz is made up of crystals that are so small a microscope must be used to see them individually – up to 30,000 in an inch. Other types of quartz can have crystals as large as inches or even feet.

Agate is a translucent to semitransparent chalcedony. Some, as you can see in the picture, don’t look translucent or semitransparent, although if they were thinly sliced you should be able to see light through them.

Within the agate family itself there are many different kinds. In future issues, I’ll explore some of those specific kinds, but for now here’s an overview of the entire family.

It is believed that the agate was first identified and named around 371 to 287 BCE by early Greek earth scientists. It was found along what is now known as the Dirillo River in Sicily. This river was called “Achates” or “Acate” by the ancient Greeks, thus the name “Agate.”

Agates are found all over the world. Some locations produce very specifically colored and patterned stones, allowing fairly easy identification. These various colors and patterns occur because of the different minerals and chemicals in the environment, which brings us to how agates are formed.

As I researched this, I discovered that there are actually a few different theories about agate formation. The theories do seem to agree that agates mostly began in volcanic rock, and specifically, in cavities formed by lava that flowed, then cooled and hardened with gaps due to gases trapped inside. The agates began as silica gel that was either already in place in these cavities, or entered with groundwater. This silica gel slowly hardened and crystallized as quartz micro-crystals, then was coated with new silica gel which hardened again, and so on. This is what caused the banding that is seen in most agates.

The silica gel by itself is a drab gray. As you can see in the picture, agates now show a huge variety of color. This color is caused by sub-microscopic metal ions that were able to seep in between the quartz crystals. Some of the more common metals are: iron oxide, which causes red, brown or yellow colors; manganese oxide that creates purple or pink; chlorite which causes green colors. There are of course others – and other types of minerals – which contribute to color.

As you can see in the picture above, some agates show very regular banding. Still others are more chaotic looking, or have uneven, wavy bands.

It is likely that the more uneven patterning was caused by pressure and heat. Those micro-crystals of quartz that make up the silica gel release heat as they crystallize, which in turn creates pressure within a closed cavity. This pressure is believed to have pushed and pulled the banding into irregular shapes. I imagine other things came into play as well over the millions of years during which agates were formed.

Sometimes the banding of silica gel is incomplete, leaving a hollow area in the middle. Often these hollows have crystals of various kinds growing inside, which we know as druzy (or drusy).

Some agates don’t have obvious banding, but instead have mossy or dendritic inclusions. We'll explore those types of agates in a future issue.

One of the fun aspects of agates is that you can find them yourself, unlike many semi-precious stones. The best places to look are in areas where erosion happens, for example on beaches, rivers, streams and dry river beds. The erosion makes the agates more obvious, as any outer sediment has been worn away. Areas where there has been volcanic activity in the past are especially good. Agates aren’t always obvious from the outside; if you see a rock that looks banded or layered, it’s possible there is agate inside. Often agates that haven’t been completely worn down by sand or water have a knobby rock appearance on the outside due to sediment coating the agates once they were exposed from the original lava cavity.

I make a lot of jewelry with agates. Here are just a couple of pictures; you can see more if you go to my shop and search "agate". And good luck hunting for agates yourself!

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Agate information sources:
Geologyin.com - https://www.geologyin.com/2016/02/how-do-agates-form.html​
​Rock & Gem - https://www.rockngem.com/agate-origins-and-formations/​
​International Gem Society - https://www.gemsociety.org/article/agate-gem-information/​

Secrets behind the stones

My first metalsmithing teacher showed me a pendant he had made that had a little design cut out behind the stone. Why? I asked him – why decorate the back? His answer was that just in case the pendant flipped over, it would look nice on the back. That kind of made sense, but it still didn’t seem worth the trouble. My sawing skills at the time were still at the beginning stages so I didn’t even consider doing that as part of my process.

However, over time and as I got more proficient with my jeweler’s saw, I decided I wanted to start doing it. It has now become one of my signatures (although I am by far not the only jeweler who does this)! As long as the stone isn’t transparent enough to see through to the cut design, and the cabochon back is finished enough to look pretty, I will add an image – and sometimes a whole scene – behind the stone. And for me it is much more than simply the possibility of the pendant flipping over.

It is a little secret that maybe only the pendant’s wearer knows about, unless they choose to share it. It sometimes tells a story about the stone, and may expand on the pendant design. It is, I hope, a little extra connection between me the creator, and the person who wears the jewelry.

I thought I’d share a little of the process - in particular the design process - involved in creating these behind-the-stone images.

How do I decide what image to use? This is determined by a few things; shape and size of the stone puts some constraints on what I can do. Some stones may have a part that is translucent, so I have to keep that in mind as well. Ultimately, the stone itself pretty much tells me what it wants on the back – not only size and shape, but the patterns and sometimes colors. Here are a few examples of how this works.

This wonderful blue lace onyx stone made me think of canyons, with rivers rushing through. I saw an eagle flying above, heading home to his mate. This was a good sized stone which gave me plenty of room for a scene in the back. So I expanded on the eagle's story, and put his mate on the back, waiting by the nest with two babies.

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I saw flames in this boulder opal. That led to the copper flames on the front – and a night sky above. I decided I wanted these flames to be gentle, benign flames and so in the back I created a little scene with two people enjoying a campfire. This pendant was bought by someone who had been evacuated due to forest fires around her home and who had quite a bit of trauma around that. She told me this pendant gave her some healing and a way to look at fire differently. This piece will always have a special place in my heart due to this story.

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Here’s another scenic design that was inspired by the color. The blue of this Shattutikite cabochon reminded me of snorkeling on a tropical ocean. I got a little carried away with the scene in the back!

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Finally, sometimes a simple image is what’s needed, like the little dragonfly behind one of my mushroom pendants. The stone was small, and a flying dragonfly fit the pendant which has a mushroom and snail on the front.

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Where do my images come from? I draw most of them by hand. I’m not the greatest artist, but I like to have my designs be one-of-a-kind and to also present my own vision. Occasionally I will use clip art images, if my drawing attempts just can’t match the image in my head.

I think about two things when using clip art, though. The first is that I have to use images that are in the public domain and that can legally be used commercially. Although it’s unlikely to happen, I don’t want to take the chance of being accused of stealing someone’s art and making money from it. The other thing about clip art is that, since I find it on the internet, so can every other jeweler out there. But, as I said, sometimes it just works better. That is the case with this rose; I just couldn’t get the idea of a rose on paper with my pencil, so I did resort to clipart.

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There are a few final things I have to keep in mind as I design. One is the pattern on the back of the stone; sometimes that doesn’t really matter, but sometimes I want to use it as part of the image.

For example, with this stone I wanted to have the boat be against the dark part and the sun in the more orange part. This is not always so easy to do as it might seem, since I put my drawing on and do my sawing from the inside of the pendant. That means my design is a mirror image of what it will look like from the back. I also have to pay attention to my maker’s stamp, which I stamp before soldering the bezel. As you can maybe see here, I cut right through it and ended up having to solder a little disc with my stamp instead.

Finally I also need to remember structural integrity. I don’t want any skinny ends to “hang out” in a way that they could get caught on something and be pulled. And of course, I can’t do something like saw a complete circle and expect the middle to stay in place. So I have to make sure there is always a bit of metal connecting things.

Once I have my design ready to go, and either have it glued to the metal or (sometimes) drawn right on the metal with a Sharpie, there is a bit of a process to sawing out those designs. This process is called piercing, possibly because it all starts with drilling (or piercing) holes into the metal. And that’s where I’ll end this section. I decided to go through this process in the Metalsmithing Tips section of this newsletter. Even if you are not a metalsmith, you might find it interesting.

Metalsmithing Tips: The process of piercing

I usually solder my bezel and pretty much everything else before doing my piercing. I know some people do the piercing first. In some ways that would be easier since you aren't dealing with having a bezel in the way, but I am worried that I might melt the thinner sections of metal in the pierced design if I get too much heat on it while soldering. Also, doing the piercing after ensures that design is right where I want it to be within the bezel.

Once I have my design glued (or drawn) onto the metal, I use a center punch and a small hammer to create a dimple in the middle of each section that will be cut out. Then I

drill a hole into each one, using the dimple as my guide. If my design segments are really small, I have to use a very small drill bit as well. I don’t like going smaller than #72 (about 22 gauge or .64mm). Smaller than this has a tendency to break way too easily (even #72 can be tricky), and it’s a real challenge trying to get a broken drill tip out that is stuck.

This has of course happened to me. If I’m lucky, there’s a little bit sticking out so I can use my pliers to pull it out. I have read that putting the piece in the freezer overnight will shrink the steel of the drill bit enough that it will fall out. I’ve not tried this myself. So far I've managed to pry broken bits out with pliers and a few swear words. I will say that lubricating the drill bit often and letting the drill do the job without pushing down helps keep the bits from breaking.

To saw, I thread my saw blade through the hole with the design side facing me and the saw handle. I generally use 6/0 sized blades and will sometimes go to an 8/0 if my design has really fine lines in it. I do sometimes break a blade or two, but the fine blades allow me to maneuver well with the small details.

The next step, once all the sections are sawn out, is to file those inside edges. I use small needle files for that. Even those small files won’t fit in all of the spaces. In the past I did my best to insert bits of sandpaper in. I have recently discovered a better way of doing this, which is to cut thin strips of sandpaper and put them in my jeweler’s saw just like a saw blade.

I tried, before cutting the strips, putting double sided tape between two pieces of sandpaper so there would be two sanding sides to my strip. However, the tape just didn’t stick well enough so I will be going back to one sided strips. A tip I saw and will try is to put duct tape on the back side of the sandpaper before cutting the strips. That will stiffen the strip and allow you to write the grit on the duct tape which is helpful. I will say that using the saw and sandpaper like this works really well!

There is another step - an actual polishing step - called thrumming which I have just read about and haven't tried. I will write about it in a future issue once I've done it.

My final step before setting the stone and final polishing is to run a very fine silicon disc along the edges of the cuts, smoothing them and giving them a nice finished look.

I am working on a pair of earrings in these pictures, using the same rose image as the pendant in the last section. They are still in progress, but here is a pair of similar earrings in copper, with wildcat faces instead of roses.

If you have questions or would like more detailed information about piercing, please send an email!

Please note: Enrollment in my Metalsmithing course is currently closed to new students. If you are interested in this course, please send me an email and I will add you to my waiting list.

I would love to hear from you. Let me know what you think, and what you’d like to see in future newsletters.