I've spent possibly too much time over the past several days working on my one sacrificial larimar, and I've come to a few conclusions.

1. It is certainly possible to remove the matrix with lots of grinding and polishing.

2. When starting with an 8mm bead, the stone that's left in the end is substantially smaller.

3. It's hard to hold an irregular 8mm nugget bead in a clamp.

4. Gah, but this isn't worth it!

Yeah. I'd held out high hopes for improving on this larimar, but it's just not going to happen within my lifetime. I suppose it's time to learn what I've already learned about turquoise: embrace the matrix.

I mean, I see perfect looking turquoise with no matrix and think it looks fake, even when I know it's not. I have a turquoise cabochon that I picked up a few years ago when one of the local jewelry stores was closing and liquidating their entire inventory. This turquoise is really an exceptional one, I can tell, but there's just something about that uniform opaque blue that seems a little unnatural.

So give me my turquoise with some variations in color and a touch of black matrix. Now if I could just think that way about the larimar, I'd be set to go.

Labels: beads, jewelry, lapidary, larimar, turquoise

A few weeks back I found something at my local bead store that I never thought I'd be able to track down for a reasonable price: a full strand of larimar nuggets. These aren't the huge ones; they average about 8mm each. The ones that are good quality are just wonderful, powder blue with swirls of robin's egg blue.

The others, though... you can find that coloration on them, but there's a lot of matrix. However, it looks like the matrix is mostly just on the surface of the stones, so if I can take off a comparatively thin layer, I can theoretically expose more of the good color (and eliminate some of the pitting along the way).

Jeff's suggestion was to grab a rock tumbler and go to town, but I want to preserve as much of the good material as I can in this process. So I've grabbed my sacrificial bead and the Dremel.

I've already found that using the standard polishing bits does next to nothing with this material, so I've broken out the diamond bits for this project. I do seem to be taking off some of the matrix, but it's a time consuming process. At this point, I still haven't quite gotten where I'd hoped to get with my one sacrificial bead, although it does look somewhat improved.

Pictures forthcoming if any of this effort is worth it...

Labels: beads, jewelry, lapidary, larimar, polishing