A stone is at its most beautiful before it's unearthed.
When I was a kid we had a world atlas. The science section was full of pictures and write-ups about a number of topics, including astronomy, oceanography, and geology. So my first three childhood career desires were astronomer, oceanographer, and geologist. The book showed pictures of quartz clusters that had been removed from deep in the earth as well as quartz that had grown inside caverns. I grew up in central Texas and had only seen the milky crackled quartz river rock, and granite. The clusters with long clear crystals and the geodic formations that looked like little worlds inside were not just lying around on the ground to pick up.
Later, when I learned a bit about how crystals form I began to wish that I could have been there, thousands of years ago as an observer when the various watery soups in their very hot, very high pressure environments, began to cool and crystals of all sorts of shapes and colors started to grow.
But that's not possible. At best we can watch video of a simple, fast growing crystal forming and extrapolate to an idea of what took place underground all those millennia ago, with various mineral soups cooling over very long periods. Luckily we have the remnants of those process to look at and own.
They're beautiful…beautiful because they were produced by the Earth…beautiful with all their cracks, inclusions, discolorations, and other variations.
My goal here is to present pieces of jewelry made using stones that have been mostly unprocessed. I say mostly because with certain stones it is necessary to file down sharp edges.
I use several colors of copper wire, mostly silver or gold tone. I hope you enjoy my store and the pieces I produce here.