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[adovbs]

These are my very first attempts at cabochon making.  When we bought our lapidary equipment, the guy we bought it from gave me a couple of picture jasper slabs.  One of them was a nice size, and had several good potential cabs in it, although it was a bit thin.  I decided to try that one first, and to make twin cabs for a set of earrings.  They don't have a fully domed front face because of the thinness of the slab and also because I didn't want to harm the "pictures" on the fronts.  The sizes and shapes ended up pretty close to the same - I worked them both together, shaping a bit on one, then doing the same shaping to the other, then going back to the first one... etc. 

There are a lot of things I could have done better, and I'm sure WILL do better with practice, but I'm pretty proud of how they turned out!  These are both about 24 x 18mm. 

[Enchantra]

For your first cabs those are looking awesome!  Give yourself a pat on the back!
I haven't made cabs myself so I cannot give you and pointers.  However I will say you are going in the right direction because you are getting a decent shine on the Jasper.   

[lithicbeads]

You need some goodbeginners stone to go with your enthusiasm, i will see what i can do . Great start.

[drnihili]

What counts as beginner's stone, Frank?

[ScarlettOSara]

I think this is a lovely set and very unusual.
It needs a name.... The River Runs :)

[Enchantra]

What counts as beginner's stone, Frank?

Frank has tons of material that would be good beginner's stones to take a crack at.  Lots of stone that is easy to work up and practice with that in the end still comes out beautiful.  Often times they are beach rocks he has hand picked.   

[drnihili]

Frank's got enough stone to keep us all busy from what I hear.  We'll try to pay him a visit once he's up to it.  In the meantime I was wonder what qualities in a stone make it good for beginners.  When he was here, he mentioned that hard was better than soft, and I'm guessing that uniform hardness is a good thing.  I'm wondering what else.  Rocks we have aplenty.  I can cut practice slabs off a number of them to tide us over.

[Enchantra]

Agates and Jaspers with a uniform hardness.  Since they range in the 6-7 range of hardness they are good candidates for beginners to learn on. 

[adovbs]

Thank you, everyone!  :-)  Enchantra, thanks for the critique on the shine!  I suspect I could have gotten a bit nicer shine if I'd kept up with the polishing step, but to be honest, I like them about like this, so it's all good.  I have some things I'm going to make sure I correct the next time I work on cabs - it's a learning process.  ScarletoSara - I like that name!  When you put them together, they really DO look like a river!

I guess you all can tell that I'm pretty excited about this - I think I carried those two cabochons with me, in my pocket, to work and back, for two days at least.  Just running my fingers over them and looking at them.  My Precious.   LOL!

Frank, thank you.  I am going to work on my skills, then take a crack at some of the really lovely jade and jasper you left us the other day.  By the way, it was great to meet you in person and see your daughter Emma again.  We would love to get together with you folks again some time when time and life permits.

I have some rainforest jasper I have marked out for my next project.  It's a nice piece but has some flaws, so the fun part was marking out cut-able sections and cab shapes that avoided the cracks and voids.  I'll post a pick of what I have laid out, and more once I get a chance to cut it over the weekend.  That's one bad thing about this time of year - our lapidary stuff is set up on the porch right now, and it gets dark so early that I really have no time to work on stone cutting during the week after work.  But the days are getting longer, so that will change soon.  We have some lights out there, but I really worry about not being able to see properly when using the saws.