Hi all:
I happened to be digging through a Michael’s crafts today, and what
to my jaded eyes should appear but a bunch of giant glass ‘diamonds’.
Bloody near 4 inches across. Not particularly high-quality, but they
were at least of reasonably accurate girdle angle. (The higher class
ones tend to be very deep, like the old mine-cuts.) The thought that
occurred to me was to use them for oversized mockup stone settings.
Basic 4 pronger, cut-away bezel, & etc.
The idea being to make a series of settings at this gawd-aweful
size, so that the students can really see the details. (And to
deliberately bugger up some of the prongs, so they can see why a
bad seat angle is a problem…) Picture a 4-prong setting the size of
a baseball, as a tangible teaching aid.
For those of you who teach stone setting, keep your eyes out for
these things. They seem to be in with the christmas stuff. Somebody’s
idea of a bauble, I suppose.
FWIW
Brian Meek