Now that you have determined which rocks you want to start working up,  you will need to decide what their final use will be.  You can make cabochons using templates to cut hearts, crosses, ovals, rounds, squares or irregular shapes.  You will also need a trim saw, grinding  and sanding wheels, and a polishing disc to turn them into wearable and finished stones.  If you like freeforms, there are some templates with ready made mountings for this sort of shape available on line.  If you like tedious and repetitive work, you can purchase a bead mill to turn your stones into finished beads.  However, this also requires cutting endless little cubes, of the same or varying sizes, to be put into your bead mill for grinding and polishing.  Then, when they are all pretty and polished, you must carefully drill each and every bead so that they can be strung together to make that stunning necklace or bracelet of self-collected material.  Sphere-making is almost the same process as the bead-making, without the drilling of course.  It takes a goodly hunk of solid material and quite a lot of cutting to make a decent sized sphere, but the results can be very rewarding. 

If you have a technical mind and already have access to a faceting machine,  you can facet opaque stones such as agates, jaspers, moonstones, and other more common materials just as you would a precious gemstone. Easiest, on the other hand, would be tumbling your rough into polished stones, then fashioning  a simple wire-wrap to make it into a nice pendant or key fob.  Turquoise and variscite lend themselves to tumbling, faceting and cabochons, with cabs being the most common and fastest way to a wearable stone.  Our friends at the Otteson's Blue Dream Mining rock shop in Tonopah graciously allowed me to photograph the steps involved in making and finishing a turquoise cabochon.  The first step is slabbing a large rock to see what potential it reveals for cabbing. Then they cut  the slabs into smaller pieces which they place on a "bed" of epoxy to coat the back of each stone, making it much more durable. 

After the epoxy has cured, it is trimmed away from each stone.  The next step is to put each stone on a dop stick, using heated wax made for this purpose.  This allows the stones to be ground, sanded and polished with more support than just your fingers.  Of course, you can simply hold the rough stone firmly and take it through the steps without a dop stick, but you may find that you have ground your fingernails and sanded your finger tips instead of the stone!  Notice the sterling silver bezels on the left side of this photo--these stones are being cut to fit those bezels, which will be finished into earrings, rings, pendants or bracelet stones. 

Here you see some finished stones still attached to the dop sticks.  They will be removed from the wax before being put into the final mountings.  In our next article, we will show more of the pictures from the Otteson's lapidary shop, with the alternate way of making stones with no dop sticks---just your fingers.  This alternate method is what they do for us after we come back in to show them what we have collected for the day.  It is a quick way to show the quality of our finds immediately.  However, if we want any of these "quick" ones made into jewelry, they finish them in the traditional way before mounting them.

Be sure and check back for Part 3 of this series!
Part 1 of this series