Beyond Cabbing: A Lapidary Handbook

Beyond Cabbing is my magnum opus: a nearly 600-page lapidary compendium built to take you far beyond cutting another oval stone.

Whether you are learning lapidary from scratch or already know how to cut a cabochon and want to push into more advanced work, this book was designed to give you a path forward. It begins with the fundamentals—cutting, drilling, shaping, sanding, polishing and tumbling—then progresses into freeform cabochons, intarsia, stone inlay, gemstone carving, reverse intaglio, fantasy carving and more.

Five sections of hands-on projects are arranged in sequence, with each lesson building from beginner work into increasingly advanced design and fabrication. At the same time, every chapter can stand on its own, allowing you to jump directly into the lapidary technique or project you want to learn.

This is not simply a book of projects. Beyond Cabbing is intended to teach how to work with stone—how to understand your tools, solve problems, choose materials, troubleshoot failures and gradually develop enough control to create your own designs rather than simply repeat someone else's.

What You'll Learn

Inside, you'll find detailed instruction and reference material covering:

• Cabochon cutting and freeform cabochons
• How to drill gemstones and glass
• Rock tumbling and sea glass tumbling
• Attaching jewelry findings to stone
• Cutting hearts, crosses, ammonites and unusual stone forms
• Lapidary inlay, stone inlay, metal inlay and crystal inlay
• Intarsia, laminated stone and composite gemstone work
• Gemstone carving and freeform stone carving
• Reverse intaglio and fantasy carving
• Slab polishing, lapidary saws, abrasives, polishing compounds and carving burrs
• Lapidary safety and working with potentially toxic stones
• Adhesives, epoxies, UV resin and bonding stone
• Jewelry metals and basic metalworking concepts
• Gemstone photography and selling lapidary work online
• Rockhounding, sourcing stone and lapidary materials
• Design principles, charts, conversions, references and a full lapidary glossary

The five main project sections contain 32 practical chapters, beginning with Cutting a Cabochon and progressing through drilling, tumbling, alternative lapidary projects, intarsia, inlay and advanced carving. The projects are deliberately progressive: tools and concepts are introduced as they become useful rather than throwing an encyclopedia of terminology at you before you know why any of it matters.

From there, the book opens into an extensive technical reference covering lapidary safety, toxic stones, oiling stones, adhesives, gemstone photography, selling online, rockhounding, sawing, carving burrs, abrasives and polishing compounds, jewelry metals, lapidary stones, design principles and practical guides. A glossary, sourcing information and additional back matter round out the reference portion of the book.

Beginner to Advanced Lapidary

If you have never cut a stone before, you can start at the beginning.

If you already cut cabochons, you do not need to spend another ten years making progressively nicer ovals.

Learn to drill them. Alter them. Laminate them. Inlay them. Carve them. Combine stone with metal. Create concaves, textures, negative spaces and three-dimensional forms. Start exposing less of somebody else's design and expressing more of your own.

That progression—from learning the machine to developing genuine control over the material—is the reason the book is called Beyond Cabbing.

The goal is not simply to show you a collection of finished projects. It is to give you enough understanding of lapidary tools, materials, processes and design that eventually you no longer need somebody else to tell you what to make.

Buy this book and you will never need another lapidary book like it.

If I were slightly less humble, I would have called it The Lapidary Bible.