I’m a self-taught hobby gem faceter and I’m still struggling with getting perfect meetpoints and consistent girdle thickness. I’m using my own Graves Mark IV and I never feel like I’m getting accurate angles, in addition to my low skill level overall. I clearly see my errors the moment I overcut something, and I will recut, but there’s only so much recutting before I decide I better call it “good enough” and start fresh. My dop transfers are sloppy but I’m getting better in everything every time I cut something. However, I wanted to know if those of you who professionally cut gemstones to sell think it is ok for me to offer my stones for sale when they aren’t perfect? What did you do when you were learning? I’ve even had people ask me to cut their rough but I turn them down because I know I can’t cut to perfection and don’t want to ruin it.
My ability to take close-up photos prevents me from fully showing my poor meetpoints and I don’t really know the value of my poorly cut stones - however, I can say confidently that even my poorly cut stones are more beautiful than the commercially cut stones in abundance (and even a lot of those have sloppy meetpoints) plus my cuts are fancy ones. Thus far I’ve been putting my stones in my own handmade jewelry to compensate for the cut but I always feel bad when someone asks me how much and I tell them my asking price (even though it is maybe a 10th of what a professional gem cutter would charge). I still spend a lot of time and effort to make it.
So…I guess the question is, how “perfect” does a cut have to be before you can sell it to the public and not offend the professional gem cutters out there? and if it isn’t perfect, without being a gemologist, is there a rough gauge to use to know what kind of price discount is appropriate to compensate without giving the stones away?
Sorry for the long post and thanks for reading!
Andrea