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Royal Sahara Jasper Gets Wired

By Dale "Cougar" Armstrong

"Lady in Waiting" by Dale "Cougar" Armstrong.

Wire jewelry designer Dale Armstrong was one of the first jewelry artisans to see Royal Sahara Jasper when Colored Stone showed it to a select group of lapidaries and craftspeople at Tucson 2008. Her enthusiastic reception inspired the magazine to sponsor an invitation-only exhibition of cut and set stones for Tucson 2009. Running from Saturday January 31st to Sunday February 15th at the Tucson Electric Park Gem & Mineral Show, the event is to be the first annual collection commissioned by the magazine. In the following article, Armstrong discusses the challenges and joys of cutting and setting this fabulous material.

Imagine receiving a box of rocks in the mail and being asked to work them into your jewelry designs. How cool is that! Better yet, imagine receiving end chips and nodules of a spectacular new material and being asked to transform these specimens into cut stones suitable for setting in your own designs. I was among a handful of lapidaries and artisans asked to participate in creating a collection of newly-found Royal Sahara Jasper jewelry and art objects, brought to a dinner last February during the Tucson Show by David Federman, Colored Stone’s Editor-in-Chief. Had he read my mind, I wondered, since I immediately wanted a few pieces of this quartz to ‘play’ with.

Suddenly I had dozens of pieces to take from rough to ready. My husband, Charlie, who is my ‘resident lapidary,’ studied choice stones. I watched fascinating patterns and scenes emerge as he cut off ends of nodules, then slabs. He then repositioned the nodule in the saw, and cut it lengthwise; again just one or two slabs. Deciding which way to continue cutting was difficult, as this material seems to have inexhaustibly many interesting angles/views.

View of Saharan Jasper cut lengthwise.	View of Saharan Jasper endcuts.

Choosing the Rocks for Me

Dale Armstrong saw "desert hills" in this wire-wrapped Royal Sahara Jasper pendant with black onyx beads.

One piece with a smooth ochre rind that was thick enough to cut in half to make an almost-matching piece featured small shrub-like dendrite patterns—reminiscent of agate ‘biscuit’ nodules we’ve gathered at the Woodward Ranch in Alpine, Texas. I chose to have my husband cab one half to be used for a bolo tie and to leave the natural backing on the other for a matching pendant. (Occasionally I like to leave part of the outer ‘rock’ showing, hopefully educating folks as to where true beauty can be hidden.) By adding a few black onyx beads, the little dendrite bush became a focal point within the stone’s ‘desert’ hills.

From Wheel to Wire

Dale Armstrong wire wrapped a pendant setting for this Royal Sahara Jasper.

The two parts of me struck a truce. For some designs the rockhound guided the designer. For those pieces I decided a simple but elegant frame is all that was necessary to show off the particular scene I wanted to bring to the eye of the beholder. Take, for example, the piece I call ‘Framed Oaks’ because the dominant jasper patterns resemble huge white oaks in the woods outside my studio. So here I kept the frame simple.

However, the designer in me was allowed more leeway with ‘Lady-in-Waiting.’ This piece features a free-form cab whose ‘hair’ frame is made with 14k rose gold-filled, 14k yellow gold-filled and argentium sterling wires, in a variety of tempers and gauges, flowing with the similar bands of color down the side of the stone.

All in all, working with Royal Sahara Jasper was a wonderful brain-break for me, providing the opportunity to enhance each stone by bringing each scene to life with just wire.

Dale Armstrong is a rockhound, lapidary and a wire jewelry designer-instructor who lives in Riceville, Tennessee. Her book, “Wireworks – An illustrated Guide to the Art of Wire Wrapping,” will be published by Interweave Press in June 2009. To pre-order a copy, go to the Interweave website (clicking this link takes you there in a new window).

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