TribeBlog

A while back we posted a photo of some really beautiful rainbow obsidian rough. We’ve made a few small sets from it and I just wanted to post some photos of those to give an example of what the stuff looks like. It is FULL of color with all sorts of shades of green and purple – colors very common to rainbow obsidian, but also beige, teal and even true blue. It is challenging to bring out the color on the faces of small items (all of this rough is quite small – largest we could get would probably be 5/8″ unless you want cabs for setting in something else) but it has been going quite well and we’ve really managed to bring out some lush detail in very small surface area.

This material is notoriously hard to photograph, but you can plainly see both purple and a true blue in the left set. These were 00g pieces with a slight Mayan flare and rounded faces to make the most of the color. The right set is showing several neutral tones of brown, gold and gray along with some hints of green. That set is 2g with a standard flare. So as you can see we’re really able to bring out a decent amount of color even with the smaller sizing.

We even have a couple of pieces that exhibit a true rainbow effect – layered banding of solid, distinctly different colors side by side. I’ll have to get a photo of that soon, it’s a beautiful thing to see.

Items we can make from Rainbow Obsidian: smaller standard plugs, small mayan flared pieces, cartilage jewelry (single flared for conch, flats/upper), labrets (we can do these quite large, especially ovals, as many pieces are larger but long and not suitable for plugs).