One of the things that drew me to faceting is the interplay between precise craftsmanship, optics, gemology, geometry, and art. Just the standard gemstone patterns are amazing works of art. But, every now and then, I stumble onto some interesting designs that I want to cut for the sheer novelty factor. They don't necessary have great optical performance, but they represent some serious creativity in terms of angle design or they touch on something historical.
I thought it would be fun to put together a list of unique and novelty designs - you know the designs that break a lot of the standard rules and sometimes don't even look like gemstones.
Here are some examples:
Polyhedra - a few years back Jeff Ford publish an article (USFG Newsletter - June 2004) describing a method for faceting the platonic solids. GemCAD files, produced by Jeff, for the Platonic solids and Archimedian solids can also be found in the OPLC CD: http://www.rockhounds.com/oplc/cd_onlin ... index.html
Letters of the Alphabet - in the 2000 USFG Newsletters (Mar-Dec) Fred Van Sant published a series of designs for creating the letters of the alphabet on the crowns of rose-cut stones. It's fun way to spell someone's name on a bracelet you make for them - for example.
So what else is there out there that could be described as "novelty designs"?
Joined: Tue May 28, 2013 9:44 pm Posts: 711 Location: Las Vegas
I have seen several novelty pattern's out there, spiders, horses, cross, ect. the thing that makes them hard to find is they are scattered on the internet everywhere and not in just one place in a Gemcad format. It would be an excellent idea to place them all here on the GO forums in the pattern section for future use.
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Another interesting category of novelty cuts are the ones with tiling patterns. MC Escher was famous for his tessellations, which were based off of various tiling patterns. {BTW, here's a great video of an imagined version of what Escher's studio might have looked like - I image there's a lot of inspiration there:http://www.etereaestudios.com/docs_html/inspirations_htm/movie_a.htm}
I know Arya has a whole series of tessellation pattern on the Gemology Project database, which represent the bulk of the 11 different tilings. I also know Fred Van Sant had a lot of regular tiling patters - triangle, square, and hexagon checkerboards (including the stone featured in the logo for the USFG).
I'd be curious if anyone has ever tried something with a Penrose tiling pattern (which can get pretty strange)?
Additionally, another interesting set of designs would be ones featuring the golden spiral. Once I played around in GemCAD trying to produce a crown with the spiral of a Nautilus shell, but I couldn't get it. I also tryed playing around to produce a sunflower pattern (with difference numbers of spirals going in different directions) but other projects took my time. I saw that Doug Menadue over at Bespoke Gems has a Phi flower, but I've never seen any of his designs published.
Anyway, I'm interested to see what other people on the board might have found.
Another interesting pattern is "Makovka" which was an international challenge stone a couple of years back. Interesting to cut and looks really great if cut in light color or colorless CZ. John
Joined: Fri Jun 25, 2010 10:06 pm Posts: 2267 Location: Chapel Hill, NC / Toronto, ON
ArsAntiqua wrote:
I know Arya has a whole series of tessellation pattern on the Gemology Project database, which represent the bulk of the 11 different tilings. I also know Fred Van Sant had a lot of regular tiling patters - triangle, square, and hexagon checkerboards (including the stone featured in the logo for the USFG).
I'd be curious if anyone has ever tried something with a Penrose tiling pattern (which can get pretty strange)?
Yup. The P series of my tessellation suite, and maybe O, can't temember, is based off Penrose tilings.
Quote:
Additionally, another interesting set of designs would be ones featuring the golden spiral. Once I played around in GemCAD trying to produce a crown with the spiral of a Nautilus shell, but I couldn't get it.
Joined: Wed Aug 24, 2011 11:48 am Posts: 584 Location: Odenton, Maryland
G_Madison wrote:
the thing that makes them hard to find is they are scattered on the internet everywhere and not in just one place in a Gemcad format. It would be an excellent idea to place them all here on the GO forums in the pattern section for future use.
Yup. Most gem design databases are based on fixed categories (RI, shape, L/W, etc.), not on a theme. We could certainly add [Category: Novelty] tag to anything posted to the Gemology Project. I just tried to log in and see that apparently I don't have a login account, so I guess I won't be doing it
It seems he does all kinds of unique things with stones. The article mentioned a few other things of interest: a topaz cut to resemble the Campidoglio on the Capitoline hill in Rome.
I also remember reading something on his website (http://johnhatleberg.com/) about his "chartgem" which was based on star charts - although how. I'm not sure.
The Campidoglio stone intrigued me, since I've always loved that piazza - so I downloaded a trial copy of GemCAD and worked out the angles, which I'll post shortly. Unfortunately there is some kind of problem with GemCAD printing through WINE on a Mac - the picture shows up fine, but the angles and other text gets all garbled in the resulting PDF. So, I can't produce a standard PDF diagram.
But, I'm curious if anyone knows of any designs based on constellations. If not, that would be pretty interesting to work out - meetpoints as individual stars.
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