The Venice lapidary Guild consisted of about a dozen people, About half of them lived on the premises, and ate communally – and by the spring, my girlfriend and I had joined them. The living quarters and “office” were upstairs, the shop. downstairs. We worked pretty much 24 hours a day. The tumblers that polished our carved stones had to run non-stop. By the fall, we had accumulated a case full of polished carvings – jade, amethyst, cirtine and smoky topaz, rutilated and rose quartz, turquois and lapis lazuli – we figured we were ready, and hit the road for the holiday season. We called on jewelers all the way from San Diego to San Francisco, and everywhere in between. Laguna and Big Sur were among our stops, and so were Beverly Hills and the Jewelry Mart downtown. We saw all levels of the trade – and to our amazement, the damn things sold. But we also realized that we would have to make some jewelry with the things ourselves, to show what really could be done with them. And adding one more production process to a facility that consisted of two one-room apartments over a 1200 sq. ft. shop floor really proved to be a problem.
Meanwhile, our landlord had gotten weary of our shenanigans, and had given us an eviction notice. By a stroke of luck, we hooked up with a similar artists collective in Hollywood called “Metamorphosis” . They sold all kinds of mineral specimens and sculptures, and had a house sitting empty just up the street from their store. It looked like an ideal union – but life is a crooked trail.
