Chapter 37
JAL Stone Age Jewelry Factoids
Polychromed lid from one of my coffins, c. 1300 B.C.
The IDEAL Gemstone size-range for JAL Stone Age Jewelry is 5mm up to 10mm. Lightweight stones or beads can be as large as 14mm, but it's not recommended. Can smaller stones be used?
Smaller high-grade expensive Gemstones can be used by doubling the stones in the vertical plane, or adding them as dependents, drops or loops. Two small stones add up to more visual impact than one larger stone, even at the same carat-weight, not sure why.
The ONLY acceptable drill-hole sizes for JAL Stone Age Jewelry is what can fit on a .16 gauge or .20 gauge COPPER wire. Larger drill-holes don't necessarily help, and very large drill-holes can make the bead or the bead arrangement unstable and wobbly.
When you work in copper, it's your work the customer is buying. When you work in silver or gold, you get the same pay for your work, but you must also sell the precious metals, and the customer NEVER understands that they are getting back a cash rebate in the form of precious metals easily exchanged for cash at the current melt-value.
So you become a metal salesperson.
This is an added burden onto the task of metalsmithing and jewelry-crafting, and should not be borne by any jeweler, so the smart thing is to design and build your samples in copper, and let someone ask if you can do the same thing in silver or gold.
Gold has only one standard for me -- solid 22.5k gold granulation beads with solid 18k wire and spacers. I don't appreciate 14k and agree with Europeans who term it "American Silver", and they're quite right -- ten out of twenty-four parts of 14k gold are mostly silver.
I like to design in 18k gold wire when the beads are spectacular. The prices of my high-grade one-of-a-kind granulation gold necklaces used to be around $22,000 to $35,000 when we showed on Rodeo Drive & Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, back in the 1980s, but that's all over now. There are no survivors with enough cash these days to buy a necklace of that type, even though the money value is now about ten percent of what it was then in buying-power.
Today's jewelry client wants something for less than fifty bucks, and you can't blame them -- they don't know if they'll have a job tomorrow, and every Friday they expect to see that pink slip in their pay envelope. Don't use pink for anything else, or you can expect some very worried faces around the workplace.
The whole point of working in the jewelry is to establish a working relationship with the jewelry, meaning that you bond with the pieces on which you work, forming a quantum entanglement of sorts -- not proton-to-proton, but a mild bonding.
This is the same bonding element you might expect from making a photo locket for someone, so it's not heavy karma, just a slight bit of connection.
You can build a much stronger bond with a piece of jewelry by running certain Orbs and sitting on the SuperBeacon for a few minutes before engaging in your jewelry labors. Combining this effect with specific Gemstones could create very powerful results, such as creating two matching rings with large 10mm powerfully occult stones such as Green Jade, Red Coral, Amazonite, Carnelian, Lapis Lazuli or Blue Chalcedony.
Of course, that's not an everyday wearing item, but some of these creations can be very much an item of daily use, especially the smaller rings with 6mm – 8mm Gemstones.
I make rings and earrings and necklaces and bracelets in pure lead-free copper, high-quality .925 round sterling silver, 14k GF-20 and 18k solid yellow gold. I keep copper in stock, all the rest must be ordered for the specific project or commission.
I offer packs of Key Beads and Gemstones at a STANDARD PRICE of $10 per package. The number of beads in the $10 package will vary, but there is NO BEAD OVER $10 in my standard packages.
ALL MY STUDENT PACKS ARE $10 PER PACK!!!
I also offer RARE ancient and tribal beads, which are kept in a temperature and humidity controlled atmosphere -- at our local bank. If you want to see the rare beads, you must make an appointment at least one week in advance of your visit so the beads can be accessed before the weekend.
I have a small number of necklaces made with ancient beads and 22.5k gold granulation. Prices and photos on Request. Again, those are in vault and require advance notice for viewing.
Don't do me any favors by buying these things. If you want them and need them for your work, that's fine, but the longer they sit in the vault, the more valuable they've become, so for me, it's like money in the bank.
Come to think of it, that might be an interesting way to store wealth. I suppose the very rich have already thought of it, and us peasants are not in great need of tax relief, are we?
I'm on Social Security, and that makes me nervous. "Secure" is the least of what I feel at this age.
If you've read down this far, you deserve the dessert:
Anger is Fear.
Well, technically, anger is DRIVEN by fear, and I'll explain. There are certain Primal Fears embedded in your nervous system, intended by Great Nature to aid you in your daily effort to survive and to avoid death, however narrowly.
Ask anyone who does behavioral studies, and they'll tell you that anger is a RESULT, not a thing in itself. Anger happens when FEAR is triggered, either externally or internally.
FEAR, Primal Fear in particular, is especially prone to knee-jerk "Flight or Fight" reaction. Flight means you run away from danger. Fight means you can't run, and must turn and do battle.
In either case, the hissing sound emanating from between gritted teeth surmounted by grimly drawn-back lips and exposed canines, will be from FEAR, not from anger.
Then you feel the anger, because you don't want to be caught feeling or showing FEAR -- that just makes things worse. So nature protects you by making you ANGRY so that the FEAR doesn't show.
Sometimes ANGER makes the FEAR go away. Sometimes the Fear Object will retreat at the sight or sound of ANGER. ANGER can be an ally, and can bring peace and harmony, but it is a double-edged sword, and can bring you down at the same time.
If you can correctly identify the ANGER as a FEAR REACTION, you're more than halfway toward CONQUERING ANGER.
ANGER MANAGEMENT consists of correctly identifying the anger as a fear reaction. That's all there is to it. Once correctly identified as FEAR, the ANGER vanishes without a trace. Hey, that's worth a few extra seconds of reading-time, isn't it?