My first job in the fine jewelry industry was in a Diamond District finishing shop that had been housed in the penthouse of a prewar building on 48th street for something like thirty years, and it was stuffed to the gills with things that were going to come in handy someday. The boss was a career stone setter but also a tinkerer generally. He knew where to find everything, where it had come from, and why he was saving it, from spent rotary tools to Dazor lamp parts to broken gemstones. One day I came to him asking for a favor. My mother had inherited a three stone opal ring that her mother had worn daily for most of her life, and unsurprisingly, the opals were in very sorry shape. I was hoping he’d be able to extract them from the vintage claw-set ring and put in new ones (it was well beyond my own skills at the time), and I asked him where I could buy the replacement stones.
He was delighted, but he never did answer that question. Instead he reached to the back of the safe and pulled out a stack of yellow paper envelopes. We used “job bags” like this to organize everything of value in the shop, but this batch was particularly well worn and well stuffed. Peeking into them one by one, he finally found what he was looking for and spread the contents of a bag out across the desk. It was dozens of opals in just the size and shape I needed for my mother’s center stone. Poking through them, he set aside one with particularly good color. “Here, pick out a few stones and take them home for your mom to look at. I’ll use whichever one she likes, but I’m thinking this is the one.” Later, when the choice was confirmed, he would choose two chipped opals with similar color from another envelope and cut them down to make matching round cabochons for the side stones.
I am clearly cut from the same mold. My shop collects vintage lamps that just need a little work, scraps of leather, hand me down engravers and worn out burs that someday will become new tools. And when my boss sat down to pull the shattered opals from my grandma’s ring, I said, “Save the pieces for me. I’m going to do something with them.”
And a little bit later, when I needed a gift for my mother, I did!
The original dream was to have them made into a floating opal, a fully enclosed, hand-blown drop of glass with opal chips suspended in mineral oil inside, like a tiny snowglobe. Floating opal sets had been a family favorite for many years, but now they were out of fashion and the only artist I could find making them at the time was in Australia. It didn’t seem practical to send my little baggie of not very attractive opal chips to Australia, as this was a sentimental project, not a high-value one. But for sentimental reasons, I still wanted to pursue the concept. Back to the internet.
My solution came in the form of some tiny glass globes, with long necks and rubber stoppers, meant to be filled and glued shut to incorporate into any arts and crafts project you can dream up. I fabricated a cap in sterling silver to accomodate the shape of the vial’s neck and made a handwoven chain to match. Then I gently washed my broken opals, dropped them in, and used an eye dropper to fill the remaining space in the globe with mineral oil, which rehydrated the stones and gave them life again. A little epoxy later and I was done!
My mother still wears this necklace often. She has finer jewelry, but there’s something really wonderful about owning things that are sentimental and handmade but not too precious to wear and use every day. Grandma’s ring comes out often for special occasions, but we try to preserve the new stones and treat them more kindly than the first batch — who knows how many trips to the beach and journeys to the bottom of the kitchen sink these little opal chips have seen? But I think they don’t resent the damage. Jewelry is meant to be worn and enjoyed. My grandmother did that with these stones, and though they were destroyed in the process, they got to take me on a pretty interesting journey as a result, and for that, I’m grateful!
Devon Makes These 
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