TribeBlog

We’ve been busy working through our custom queue and we’d like to showcase some of the beautiful custom projects to come out of our workshop recently.

Beautiful gemmy Virginia amazonite pyramid faced plugs in 00g/9.2mm with 3/4″ / 19mm faces. This is a very fragile material and these were very tricky to make but turned out wonderful.

Here is our signature pinwheel flower design carved in black jadeite and inlaid with 6mm gem quality Idaho opals. The inlays are wrapped in silver bezels and the stones are riveted together with hardware – we do not use glue in our fine stone inlay projects.

This was a very intensive project involving several artists from our team. Custom drawings, which the customer approved, followed by wood carving, stone carving and then metal work. The sugar skull plugs carved in ebony and have both oval faces and an oval wearing surface in 32mm. The eyes are gem grade amethyst meticulously hand carved as 8mm wide flowers, each with a hidden metal setting and rivet securing the stones to the wood. As with all of our high end mixed-media projects, these pieces involve only the finest materials and traditional jewelry settings, with no glues used.

These very special pieces were a pleasure to work on. These are 3″ Narra plugs with traditional African clay lip plates carved down to serve as unique inlays. The Narra plugs were carved with a specific bowl angle to the faces which allowed us to, with a very large hidden silver setting, bezel set these pieces floating over the edge of the wood so that the very fragile clay edge makes no contact with the plug, and in fact hovers over the surface of the wood, casting a shadow that showcases the lip plates as if they were hanging in a display.

We have been the first company to bring several materials to the world of body jewelry, including this very rare ammolite material. Ammolite is the fossilized iridescent material from ancient ammonite shells. It is one of the rarest gemstones on earth, occurring in gem quality in one or two places worldwide. The material is extremely fragile and very thin – fractions of a millimeter – which requires very careful excavation and handling. As such, we set these pieces as triplets, which are composed of a layer of ammolite material backed with a slate base and protected by an optical quartz cap. These beautiful cabochons are set into 5/8″ ebony plugs with a silver hardware setting.

Speaking of unique materials, you won’t see this anywhere else. These are 35 million year old botanical fossils (a fern variety) set with a hidden silver setting and rivet into Narra wood.

We hope you’ve enjoyed the eyecandy!

We’re always on the lookout for new ways to utilize materials, and more ways to incorporate the humbling beauty of nature into our artwork. We want to share with you a few new ideas we’ve been working on.

We’ve been really getting into raw crystal faced plugs as art jewelry/special occasion jewelry. You’ll sometimes see raw faced amethyst or citrine plugs, but we wanted to move past the common quartz variants into more interesting materials. We’ve recently worked two sets of beautiful crystal faced plugs that we’re very happy with.

The first is a base of fluorite with a matrix of rainbow pyrite and calcite growing from the surface. The pieces are 1″ in size, with a slightly larger front face.

The second set of crystal faced pieces we’d like to present are from a material never used in body jewelry until now. They are beautiful rough faced Cavansite specimens. The blue is just incredible, no photo could do them justice. They glow.

The next idea that we have been very excited about involves a childhood obsession with collecting fossils. These are, to our knowledge, the first pair of hardware set botanical fossil plugs that have ever been produced. They feature a ~300 million year old mirrored fern fossil from the Mazon Creek area of Illinois. The wood is Narra, and has a Mayan flare and angled faces to frame the inlays. The fossils themselves are hardware set with a reverse bezel setting that allows us to avoid wrapping a bezel around the front edge, and enabling us to maintain the natural height variation along the edge of the fossil itself.

We’ve been busy working on a variety of new custom work, from carved designs to simple pieces that really let the material speak for itself. These are some recent examples of pieces that have gone from our workshop to happy homes all over the world, enjoy!

A beautiful set of custom hand carved Tiger Ebony flowers with hardware-set striped labradorite inlays.

A set of 3″ silver streak obsidian tunnels. Below, the matching labret.

A small army of labrets – some custom pieces, and some are currently available on the site. From left to right, top to bottom:

1. Spiderweb imperial jasper (top left)
2. Red brecciated jasper
3. Picture jasper
4. Tiger’s eye
5. Moss Agate
6. Blue mustang picture jasper (bottom left)
7. Labradorite
8. Chrysoprase
9. Seraphinite
10. Strawberry rutilated quartz

Check out the Labret section of the website for the available pieces.

Beautiful 2″ tunnels made from Blue Mustang Picture Jasper.

Incredibly small 4g Maya flowers from B.C. nephrite jade. The pair is sitting on a USA dime ($0.10) coin for size reference.

Very custom Ebony sugar skull plugs with hardware-set AAA grade faceted amethyst eyes.

Wonderful condor agate teardrop plugs. We just loved the vibrant yellow-orange-red magma feel to these.

We’ve been working on these for ages and we’re happy to say they are finally finished. This was a very custom collaboration between Onetribe and our dear friend Ana Paula of Quetzalli jewelry in Mexico City, Mexico. We designed this set for a customer of ours, and it was to include very ornate filigree in gold. While we have this capability to some extent in our own workshop, we are very good friends with Ana and we figured who better to help us out with this project than Ana and her team of traditional filigree artists.

We did some illustrations to get started, rough carved the ivoryite stone and the red Chiapas amber (very rare) cabochons and sent the lot down to the Quetzalli workshop to have the filigree and setting created.

Once we received the completed filigree assemblages back at the Onetribe workshop, we set the amber cabochons, finished up the stone carving and assembled them into their final arrangement (which is of course hardware set, with no adhesives in this project – par for the course for Onetribe products). There are some things about this project that are truly unique. First, the red amber in these is just exquisite, and this is a very rare material – very little is found per year in Chiapas and this is dead solid in color.

Next, the filigree is incredibly ornate. We’re constantly trying to push the boundaries of what we do, and this included working with Quetzalli on a 100% unique setting for these pieces. We were thrilled to see very little variance between our original illustrations and our final assembled pieces. The filigree is also concave to conform to the concave shape of the stone face, which makes these, geometrically, incredibly difficult to create. Lastly, keep in mind the filigree on these pieces is a mere 19mm (3/4″) from point to point! The ‘o’ that caps each point is an incredible 1.5mm from outside edge to outside edge (shown in detail below, top right of frame).

This is truly a 100% one of a kind, world class set of stretched ear lobe jewelry. We are thrilled with the outcome and can’t wait to push the boundaries again with the next set. Huge thanks to the Quetzalli family for helping us out with this project. We’ve had a great relationship for several years, helping each other out with things here and there, and we can’t wait to collaborate on the next amazing project.

A local customer approached us with some material requests and ideas and we worked together to create these beautiful custom plugs. The outer material is ivoryite, a snow white stone that is slightly harder than ivory, and for the record, a great vegan alternative to bone and antler (both light colored materials). The ivoryite is carved in a traditional blocky flower style reminiscent of Aztec design, and into it we have inlaid a very flashy ‘pancake’ cabochon of deep blue labradorite, affixed with an impressive eight prong setting from fine silver.

The first step was to begin grinding the ivoryite itself into the plug shape with a Mayan flare and to start etching out the petals. In the below photo, one piece has already been rough carved and had the beginning of the seat for the inlay cut, while the other has been just started. The drilling and the cutting of the seat is very time consuming and somewhat difficult, as all is done by hand and the seat and tunnel must be near perfectly square. Stones will also break most frequently at this stage.

This next shot shows both plugs roughed out with the seats started, and the beginnings of the labradorite that will become the cabochons. Shown is the start of one inlay and the rough block of labradorite which will be fashioned into the second inlay. This really gives you a feel for how exquisite the flash in these pieces is – this is still very heavy grit with no polish.

Below we are test fitting the height of the cabochon in the seat, and making sure there will be room for the base of the setting and the prongs which will hold the labradorite firmly against the ivoryite.

Next, we test fit both pieces and ensure that height and fitment will work before beginning the setting itself. At this point, the setting is also being fabricated. After the setting is completed the ivoryite will be further refined to ensure a tight, even fit.

Sidney, Onetribe’s go-to for metalwork, fabricating the top of the prong setting.

The pieces were made hollow because it is a more unique, more complicated process to hardware set something that is translucent, and because some labradorite, when cut thin, is indeed translucent and in sunlight will show interesting pink/purple tones hidden in the gray. These were taken in artificial light, so that unfortunately doesn’t show, but you can tell they are indeed translucent.

The finished work, and our very happy local customer wearing his unique jewelry for the first time.

Big thanks to Stephen, our customer in this shot, for giving us the opportunity to engineer something beautiful and new, and Sidney, our metalsmith, for helping to make the magic happen!

We’ve been cranking out amazing jewelry like never before, and our customers constantly present us with great challenges in terms of using materials in new ways. Below you’ll find some recently produced custom jewelry by our staff here at Onetribe.

This was an incredible set of custom designed, hand carved knife-edged crazy lace agate weights at 4g/5.1mm. No other company is doing custom designed, one off hand carved stone right now.

A beautiful suite of crazy lace agate jewelry for lobes, ear cartilage, lower and upper lip piercings.

Highly desirable gunmetal flash sodalite teardrops at 7/8″. This material has a flash in the dark gray areas similar to labradorite, but monotone.

Priceless Chuconhueso jadeite carved Onetribe signature “Maya Flower” tunnels. Both sets at 12mm.

Beautifully simple obsidian dome-faced teardrop plugs, 1 1/4″.

Custom labret plugs in 3/4″, oval obsidian and absolutely flawless gem & museum grade Chiapas amber.

Incredible blue mustang picture jasper round labret.

Blue mustang picture jasper Mayan flared plugs

7/8″ Seraphinite plugs

Just epic 1.5″ orange/blue labradorite teardrop plugs. Some of our favorite pieces, ever!

Very unique blue-green striped 9/16″ teardrops.

1 1/4″ labradorite plugs in an intense orange/copper color with some green/blue fades

As you can see, we’ve been working hard to put out the best quality natural jewelry money can buy. If you are interested in having anything made from these or other natural materials, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!