This should be the last posting I make before leaving for Tucson next Friday. Hopefully I'll come back with lot of new and interesting stones.

I got 4 new stones cut this week, mostly worked on some garnets, and one spinel. Just some quick descriptions, NFL playoffs again!

Green Grossularite Garnet



Yellow Grossularite Garnet



Pink Spinel. This one is from Mahange, but not that neon pink/red color. A bit of a color changer turning more lilac in daylight.



Last stone is a Color Change Garnet from Umba Tanzania. Here's 3 pictures. The first is with my normal SOLUX bulb lighting set up. The next two are actually the same photo, but I adjusted to color to look how I see the stone in both incandescent and florescent light. A very unique stone.

Tags: Spinel, grossular garnet, Green garnet, Color Change Garnet

Over the years I have been working on perfecting a round design. I always found that the SRB (Standard Round Brilliant) design with 58 facets was good, but still had a lot of extinction and not that much life. My Jua round is the results of many trials and refinements, and I think it works really well, producing a stone with a lot of brilliance and scintillation. These two new stones this week are both cut in this design, with the angles slightly modified for each stones refractive index. The garnet, having a higher refractive index than the tanzanite has slightly shallower angles on the pavilion.

This first stone is one I bought a few years ago in Tanzania. It is a Color Change Garnet, but one with out a real strong color change, but much brighter than most with a strong change. In incandescent light the stone has a cherry red color and very strong saturation.



This next stone is a natural blue, un-heated Tanzanite. I find the natural blue stones cut very pretty stones, and a nice addition to a collection.

Tags: Tanzanite, Color Change Garnet