Vancouver Island Faceters Guild

Curtting Patterns

Internet searches for faceting patterns will lead to hours and hours of fun and distraction. There are many sites dedicated to patterns and designers are infinitely inventive and creative. Once you begin looking for patterns you will find that your collection of "I have to cut this pattern" patterns will quickly grow to the point where even if you lived to be 150 you would never be able to cut them all. Still you will find yourself hard pressed to stop collecting. 

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Selecting patterns for cutting based on the type and colour of material you have available is certainly a good base practice. Eventually you will start looking for patterns that allow you to maximize the amount of stone you can utilize from the starting rough. Typically a cut stone will end up being somewhere between 30% - 40% of the starting weight of the rough material. It seems like a huge waste but there really isn't much the average cutter can do to change that. 

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One of the other considerations when selecting a pattern is the degree of complexity of the cut and the degree of accuracy required for the rows of facets. If your machine won't allow you to control the number of degrees to 1/100th of a degree then that would be a limiting factor in you choice of a pattern. This is not a hard rule as you can always work around that limitation with a lot of practice and judicious and careful use of the cheater control on your faceting head.