Now for something completely different
Dave Ellis changes it up this week with images in honour of the Peterborough Gem, Mineral and Fossil Show
I thought I would change things up a little bit this week to coincide with the upcoming Kawartha Gem and Fossil Club’s annual Peterborough Gem, Mineral and Fossil Show.
My subjects in this column move a little slower than the ones I usually photograph. In a past life before I started wildlife photography I ran a small business cutting semi-precious stones and making silver jewelry.
I presented my work at a circuit of craft, and gem and mineral shows all through Ontario. For several years when Astrid and I first moved to the Kawarthas we had a booth at the Peterborough gem show.
It started as an interesting hobby. I had bought some equipment for cutting and polishing gemstones. As I began to learn how to use the equipment I became completely fascinated by the hobby. It was hard to believe that these beautiful stones came out of the earth in so many wonderful colours and patterns.
By simply cutting and polishing Mother Nature’s work one beheld the most marvellous little gems one could imagine. A person who cuts and polishes stones is called a lapidary. Some of the semi-precious stones to work with could be found and collected at various public locations across Canada and the United States, but most had to be purchased from rock shops, miners, or rough stone dealers.
At some places where semi-precious stones are found, one can pay a fee to be allowed on a property to collect stones. These days most of the work of cutting and polishing the stones is done with synthetic diamond tools.
Diamond is much harder than the stones you are cutting so it cuts them quite quickly. Diamond saw blades are used to slice the stones into slabs. The slabs can then be polished as ornaments or can be further cut into shapes called cabochons, to fit into pieces of jewelry. That is how I progressed in the hobby.
After being very enthusiast and cutting many, many stones I needed to find something to do with them, so I had to learn how to do silverwork. It was a painstaking process to learn, but very satisfying and interesting.
At first my favourite stone to cut was turquoise but after learning about other stones and how they formed in the earth, they became more fascinating. Agates are a form of quartz, one of the most common minerals on earth, but they have various impurities mixed in that give them an infinite variety of colours and patterns. Different agates come from almost every country around the globe.
We have several varieties here in Canada and even here in Ontario. In some places around the shores of Lake Superior one can find banded agates called Lake Superior â¨agate mixed in with the rocks on the beaches.
In Nova Scotia around the Bay of Fundy agates have been washing out of the cliffs for millions of years. These agates formed in volcanoes and as the lava cooled the agates separated from the rest of the lava like oil in water and eventually cooled and hardened into beautiful stones.
I can’t even begin to describe this fascinating hobby in a short column like this but if it interests you, the Peterborough Gem, Mineral and Fossil Show or later in the year, Brancroft’s Rockhound Gemboree would be well worth exploring.
The Peterborough show runs next weekend on Sat. March 2 and Sunday March 3 at the Healthy Planet Arena¨.In another column in the future I will talk about the silverwork part of the hobby.