So a few years ago I got into trying to cut odd shapes. These shapes almost never make it into jewelry, but produce some interesting results. This one worked well for the small peridot I used it on. I got lucky in that the stone was already close to the final size, and ended up with a yield of 63% of the original....
This was a commission of a piece of rough I was asked to purchase at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show a few years back. I cut it using a design by Arya Akhavan called Aperture Science....
So this is a good example of great light return from a very saturated pyrope garnet. This stone I cut shortly after I first started cutting, and on machines that were not very precise. You can see how the cut isn’t very symmetrical near the table on the left side....
This is most likely a Mexican long-tongue bat. It could potentially be the tube-lipped nectar bat, but they have a protruding, funnel-like bottom lip, which I’m not seeing here.