George Ingraham of TaoGem may have closed up shop a bit ago, but his blog posts remain on the site and offer some nice jewelry tips we can all learn from.

One such article explains how he worked to turn azurite / malachite druzy into beautiful polished gemstones.

One obstacle he explains is dealing with a lot of porosity, leading to experimenting with Opticon, and some epoxies to fill the pitted areas.