I have been wondering for a while about what I can do with all these tumble stones that we have, mainly the ones that are too small for jewellery or not good enough for jewellery.
So I decided to have a go at making a gem tree out of some Amethyst tumble stones.
First of all I found an end piece of Amethyst left over from a lump that had been slabed, a nice flat face on one side to serve as the base and rough on top, then I “borrowed” some of Shalini’s silver plated copper wire, 0.8mm, to make the tree out of.
As you can see I cut 12 lengths of the wire, six being shorter than the other six and left about 2 inches protruding at the bottom before I started to wrap the trunk.
One I had wrapped the trunk, I splayed the shorter bits at the end so they would go over the rough top of the base slab, after much bending a poking about to get the “roots” sitting on the slab properly I then used Devcon Epoxy to glue it in place, I used too much of this and it ended up a bit messy, read on to see how I hid this.
Next I selected the tumble stones that I wanted to use and started to attach them onto the branches, I found that by making a large loop at the end of the branch and then tightening the loop around the stone, it would stay in place while it was glued with the epoxy.
Now I had to go and hide the mess I made at the bottom, this was easily done using small tumble stones glued into place.
As I said this is the first attempt and I hade to figure out how to do it as I went along and I learnt much for the next time and there will be a next time because we have so many tumble stones to use up. Actually I am quite pleased at the finished item.