Gemstones

Rather colorful dragons with the names of gemstones.

Size = 14“ x 9“ (14 ct.)

Carnelian

I love red. And yellow. Can you tell?Anyway, the original version of this dragon pattern is huge (32” x 27”) and has the colors of a copperhead. It’s hanging in the office/workroom of my house. I really like the pose, but Marilyn and Shari at Picture This (my distributors, art critics, and all around excellent advisors) hastily informed me that it was too big to sell and that only someone crazy (like me) would want to stitch something that large. So, I shrank it. I decided that I didn’t want to just redo the original snake skin design and thought I would try some random abstract sort of thing. In red. And yellow.

Then I had to decide which cloth to do it on but balked when Marilyn first suggested Midas. That would just be too gaudy. Marilyn won, of course, and I stitched it on Midas, and I think it looks really great there. The lesson here: listen to Marilyn and Shari, they know best.

The design is named after one of my favorite gemstones, Carnelian, which is a type of quartz that comes in red. And yellow. And all shades between.

Garnet

I think I mentioned once how much I like red. In fact garnets are one of my favorite gemstones, all sparkly deep redness, some with hints of yellow, some with purple. Reds are the color of warmth, of comfort, and life and as such, hold a special place in the spectrum of light.

Garnet is a type of silicate and has been a prized gemstone since the Bronze Age. It comes in a multitude of colors, including the commonly known red. Garnet sand can be used as an abrasive and is a frequently used substitute for silica in sandblasting.

Size = 10“ x 11“ (14 ct.)

Size = 10“ x 8.5“ (14 ct.)

Lapis

I like blue too. Actually, I like pretty much all colors, the deeper and richer the better, but red and blue are very symbolic ones. Red is volatile, fiery, energetic, all those really active verbs. But blue is restful, cool, and calm. Again, this ‘gemstone’ dragon has an abstract patterning of shaded color, and, to go along with its restful nature, I chose to stitch it on Icon, a lovely calm colored cloth. Can’t you just picture this guy fading away into the deep blue of twilight, those startling red accents being the last you’d see of him?

Lapis Lazuli is a rock composed of many different minerals. It is most often a deep, dark blue with veins of gray-gold pyrite or other colored minerals. A very restful type of stone.

Size = 11” x 14” (14 ct.)

Peridot

I like red and blue a lot, but green is also a very nice color. It’s the color of new spring growth and symbolizes the yearly renewal of life. So, it seems appropriate that the day I wrote this is Earth Day, when we celebrate our planet and all the organisms with which we share it.

Green plants are green because of a pigment called chlorophyll, which allows them to capture light energy from the sun. They use light energy to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, and in the process, transform light energy to chemical energy that can then be used for growth. Animals that eat plants also use this converted energy for growth. If humans could figure out a way to duplicate what plants can do, we could produce unlimited quantities of hydrogen fuel to replace the polluting fossil fuels on which we now depend.

Peridot is a type of Olivine, a silicate rich in magnesium and iron.

Size = 12” x 12” (14 ct.)

Bloodstone

I sometimes have a strange taste in colors. I like intense colors, rather than just bright ones, and deep reds are some of my favorites. I find red mixed with a lovely, deep charcoal grey to be a very appealing combination. So, the rare grey form of bloodstone is consequently one of my favorite gemstones.

Bloodstone has the chemical formula of SiO2 (silicon dioxide). The specific type of silica is called chalcedony. The name ‘bloodstone’ came about because of the presence of spots and streaks of red jasper or iron oxide (a rusty red color), which supposedly resemble drops of blood. Most bloodstones are dark green with red, though a few are more grey in color. I chose to make the bloodstone dragon grey with streaks of blood red.

Jade

I recently thought that it would be fun to design an Asian style dragon, which have a more beneficent reputation that do dragons of more European mythologies. Asian dragons typically are long serpentine creatures with no wings & four clawed feet. They are often depicted with antlers and/or long slender whiskers. They are often associated with water. It seemed ideal to make such a dragon into one of the ‘Gemstone’ styles, and to use jade as the gem. This fellow also has inlaid designs along his sides in the written Kanji. From front to back, these mean ‘Fire’, ‘Water’, ‘Earth’, and ‘Air’.

Jade comes in two varieties of silicate, the calcium and magnesium rich, hard nephrite, and the sodium and aluminum rich softer jadeite. Jade comes in a variety of colors, the most familiar of which is a blue-grey green.

Size = 10“ x 14“ (14 ct.)

Opal

This is my second Asian style dragon. She is a bit more delicate in features and has horns rather than the antlers depicted on ‘Jade’. But, she does have the sinuous body, long whiskers, and absence of wings common to dragons of the East.



Opals are basically a form of hydrated silica, meaning it is glass with water in it. This odd combination causes light passing through the crystal to diffract and change colors, sometimes into one wavelength sometimes into several, so that an opal can contain a variety of changing colors as it is moved around within a beam of light.

Size = 11“ x 14.5“ (14 ct.)