We had incredible success with the Amazonite material that we sourced from a local mine in 2009 so we decided to ring them up and go out there again in January. Here’s a snapshot of some of last year’s material:
For more information on our previous trip and more photos of the mine grounds and such check out last year’s trip post: Onetribe Goes Mining! We didn’t document quite as much this year as we’d already visited previously and both us and the mine owner had schedules to keep.
Amazonite is a microcline feldspar with an incredible blue-green color that occurs a few places in the world, and one of those places is about 40 minutes from our Onetribe HQ here in Richmond, Virginia. Amazonite, depending on the quality, can vary from a mostly white to sea foam green color to a very deep, semi-translucent green-blue color unlike any other stone. For a while we had been working material from Brazil and by pure chance stumbled upon the local source, which conveniently happens to be hands down the nicest material we have ever seen. We started working the local material in early 2009 and received immense response from customers for standard plugs and custom orders, some involving gem grade semi-translucent material that is very rare.
The mine owner was happy to oblige and we made an appointment to show up on a Friday afternoon. Since we last visited we’ve hired one new employee and had another that didn’t go out last year so we decided to close up shop early and make it a company field trip. We had a ton of fun, as we often do at work.
The mine is a very small operation, family owned and mostly geared toward school field trips coming out and panning for Amazonite, small garnets, non-gem quality topaz, mica, quartz and other stones that occur here in Virginia. It’s a very basic setup with zero automation, minimal machinery, and lots of manual labor to get the material out of the ground. Walking around the grounds you really get a feel that this is not a fancy place, but rather a small scale labor of love for the owner, who has a background in much larger geology and mining operations.
There are large pieces of material of varying quality sitting around on the ground, and one of the neat things about visiting is that the ground is literally splashed with incredible color as Amazonite is very fragile and easily fractures into small pieces, which litter the ground like tiny bits of semi-precious trash.
When we visited last time we were told that there was some really nice material down in the walls that they’d yet to bring up to the surface. This past autumn they finally had a chance to get in there and do it, and the material got stored away unsearched until we got our grubby little jewelry making stone geek hands on it.
In 2009 it was bitterly cold but we roughed it for the sake of sweet rocks. This time not only was it bitterly cold, but it was raining so basically it was miserable. But we did it for you guys! Okay, a little for us too, we do heart sweet rocks.
We take a lot of pride in going through the effort to hand pick most of the materials we use for our jewelry. One stone at a time, from tiny slivers barely large enough for 6mm cabochons to pieces large enough for jewelry several inches in size, we spent the next couple of hours sorting for best color and quality and speaking with the mine owner about our selections.
I have no idea what the hell I was doing, but it was funny and I think Marshall, our wood turner and dedicated mine documentarian (and only other full time staff member in our Virginia studio not in these photos – we’s small!) was laughing so hard the shot got all crazy. I was obviously proud of “deez rocks!”
We walked out with nearly 100lbs of material, and I just took about half of that down to our second workshop in Indonesia for production runs of plugs, teardrops and some septum spikes that will be done a little later this spring. We also set aside some of the nicest material – deepest color and saturation and most translucent, for a run of very high quality cabochons for bezel setting, and of course there’s plenty on hand here at the Richmond workshop for custom work.
Expect some beautiful things to be available from this wonderful material this spring! 