roxzart: creating unique handmade pieces from lapidary rough to finished jewelry
ABOUT roxZart
MY FAVORITE NM DOUBLE ANGEL WING ROOTBEER QUARTZ DRUZY WIRE WRAPPED PENDANT!
It all started in 2008: My hubby bought me a gorgeous string of turquoise beads at a Whiskey Row shop in historic downtown Prescott, Arizona. I began buying lots of turquoise strands & beads! When asked if I was buying them to sell, I said “no…they’re for me”. Then I was asked how many turquoise necklaces I could possibly have and wear. I replied, smiling: “365…one for each day of the year!”
We retired from Oregon to Prescott, joined several Rock Clubs to collect our own semi-precious stones, began cutting & polishing those stones, took lapidary courses at the local college to enhance my skills, and I started selling my pieces at local jewelry shows. I joined several Jewelry Artist groups and have taken many workshops to learn a variety of jewelry techniques.
Mediums and Techniques:
Semi-Precious Stones and Minerals: My semi-precious stones are often collected locally. Those not native to Arizona, but beautiful to work with, are often purchased at the gem and mineral shows in Quartzsite and Tucson. Some of my favorites are: turquoise, Colbaugh Kingman turquoise products, petrified woods and marine fossils, agates.
Per Nat’l G: A rock is made up of two or more minerals, can also contain organic compounds, & differ from one region to another because of the rock formation cycle. So minerals may or may not have been formed at the same time. A mineral, by definition, is any naturally occurring, inorganic substance, often additionally characterized by an exact crystal structure. Its chemical structure can be exact or can vary within limits. Native elements that occur naturally are also considered minerals. Minerals also have distinctive properties, such as color, hardness, crystal habit, specific gravity, luster, fracture, & tenacity. Many of these properties can vary among a single mineral, within limits. Many minerals exhibit certain properties that others do not, such as fluorescence & radioactivity.
Precious Metal Clay [PMC]: It was developed in the early 1990s in Japan. The material consists of microscopic particles of pure silver or fine gold powder and a water-soluble, non-toxic, organic binder which burns off during firing. It consists of very small particles of precious metals (silver, copper, bronze, gold or platinum) mixed with an organic binder and water. After drying, it can be fired in a kiln or with a handheld gas torch. The binder burns away, leaving pure, sintered metal…for example: 99.99% silver! Shrinkage of 8-30% occurs, which can result in very fine details.
Dichroic Glass: Dichroic (pronounced "dye-crow-ick") glass: commonly called dichro for short, has fantastic multicolor and reflective properties. It appears to have more than one color at the same time when viewed from different angles and with different lighting. This reflective phenomenon is known as thin-film physics, which is also why you see swirling rainbow patterns in a soap bubble, floating colors from oil on water and the dramatic colors of dragonfly wings. Dichroic glass art has been around since the Roman Empire. When making dichroic glass jewelry, the type of metallic oxides, order in which they are applied, and the number of layers used effects the final look of the glass. It is fired in a kiln at high temperatures to fuse the oxides to the glass.
Polymer Clay: It’s an art medium that is versatile, pliabile & simple to work with. It is composed of polymers, resins, coloring agents & fillers. It’s man-made from a plastic, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) base. You just bake it in a toaster oven!
Metals and Techniques: Silver, Copper, Brass, Bronze, Argentium…sawing shapes, texturing, fold forming, hollow forming, etching, coloring using several methods, adding stones/ dichroic glass/ etc to enhance the metal piece and produce unlimited unique appearances on metal jewelry.
Texturing: Is usually done by using hammers with different patterned heads or with metal stamps.
Fold Forming: Metal is folded & hammered; repeatedly heated/ folded, & then unfolded resulting in a dramatic 3-D jewelry piece.
Hollow Forming: Produces a hollow “vessel” which can then be embellished to create phenomenal jewelry pieces.
Etching: I draw my own designs onto a metal piece & dip it into a special solution to enhance the pattern I’ve drawn.
Patinating: This is only one way to color copper, bronze and other metals by tarnishing them using oxidation or other chemical processes. This produces very unique one of a kind very colorful jewelry pieces.