This giant luna moth neckpiece! It was delicate and large and I had to carve it, then break it up into five separate pieces for casting. Then assemble it at the end. It is set with a fantastic giant Ethiopian opal, with additional Australian opals in the wings. Stones are a gradient of sapphires and tsavorite garnets from bright green to yellow. 14K white gold.

It’s big!

Figuring out how to photograph it was challenging. It was too big to photograph hanging in my (extremely professional) photo-box (made from a Trader Joe’s wine box)… Also, the my winebox helps with photographing metal detail by keeping reflections at a minimum, but makes it hard to photograph stones because it kills the fire. Sadness!

Here’s a pic letting in some of the light. Now the metal is very contrasty and reflecty, but the opals are looking sweet.

And the other way around: opals are muted, but metal detail is clear.

Sigh. No way to win without spending an annoying amount of time putting together composite images in photoshop. Let’s go outside.

Natural light in the shade! This was a nice compromise.

Sunlight! Whoa nelly.

Here are some of the wax images. Yes, I broke it about 20 times during the carving process. I tacked it down to a larger wax ‘table’ I put together out of a bunch of other wax pieces. This helped immensely to keep things stable while I picked at it with my tools.

I sweated setting these opals so much (set once the piece was in metal; I never cast stones in place, and you would not be able to with delicate material like opal anyway). I actually dropped the large center opal at one point during the carving process. It landed just *so* on the metal spoke of my bench chair and the tip popped off! I freaked right the hell out but was able to have a lapidary friend reshape the tip for me with very little length lost.