Victoria’s original Rock & Gem Show is back this March at the da Vinci Centre, located at 195 Bay Street, Victoria BC! Your favourite vendors are here with their amazing selections of rocks, minerals, crystals, fossils, jewelry and home decor. We’ve added more door prizes and this year’s Grand Prize is spectacular! Bring your family and friends, we are looking forward to seeing you.
Victoria, owner of Twisted Fern Designs presented her work and how it is evolving on Monday evening at our monthly members’ meeting.
Victoria started Twisted Fern Designs in 2017 having acquired a crochet addiction the year before. In 2018 she became a member of Sidney Lapidary Club, and quickly fell in love with Metal Smithing and learned to incorporate BC stones. While Silver Lace is the main focus of her creations, she still enjoys creating stone set pieces, using local island beach finds and her favourite handpicked UK stone, Lewisian Gneiss.
Twisted Fern’s Silver Lace Jewelry and Sculpture marries 19th century lacework traditions with the geometrical complexity of the natural world. Crocheted Silver is strong, yet light, and allows great scope for creativity and a wide range of design.
Each piece is hand-crafted from 100% reclaimed Silver, using antique hand tools; a modern and sustainable imagining of a heritage craft. You can check out Victoria’s website at: www.twistedferndesigns.store.
Also at the meeting, Bill Needoba had a show table of fossils he collected during Summer Camp 2019 at Galloway (E Kootenays) in BC.
In the January member’s meeting we elect and appoint our board members for the year. This year the following have committed their time, energy and expertise to keeping our club running.
Note: The Island Zone reps do not change in January, but in March.
In other news, the meeting was well attended and lively with wide-ranging discussions of club business.
The first evening of Gemboree 2019 had an open-air wire wrapping workshop in the big central canopy. It was a blast. Over half the gemboree attendees particpated and the rest formed a relaxed cheering team. The workshop was led by Suzanne Rivard, whose work can be seen at www.suzannart.com. Suzanne was patient and encouraging with a slightly rowdy crowd whose abilities ranged from beginner to been-doing-this-for-ages. The results were beautiful and each one worth wearing. Some of us continued redesigning our pieces for the rest of the weekend.
One of the field trips on offer at the 2019 Gemboree was to the Calco Copper mine north of Campbell River. In 1955 five tonnes of ore were removed and sent to Tacoma for processing. It yielded 1011 kg of copper and 250g of silver. The mine is on private property and requires permission to access. The trip was led by
On the way back to Courtney we stopped at the viewpoint for the historic Ripple Rock explosion, a short documentary on youtube. It was the biggest manmade explosion of the time and it took them several failed attempts before they could pull it off.