Recovering from ankle surgery has me homebound this winter. The good side is that it has forced me to focus on making many new jewelry pendants.

Having the extra time has also allowed me to make more complicated stone pieces. This blog will concentrate on pendants with multiple pieces. Many of them are hinged so the bottom moves. There are advantages to this configuration. When you sit, stand, or move, the pendant will react and make it more noticeable (and who doesn’t want to be noticed?). There is no reason why everything in life needs to be static. (Man, that’s a pretty profound statement). Enjoy these new artworks, as much as I did making them.

The collection posted features primarily Great Lakes Regional Gemstones, but there are a couple non-Great Lakes Gems in the mix.

This will be the first part of two or three blogs on new jewelry I’ve made recently. Most of the new ones are for sale on line, or are in our show inventory. If you are interested in any of them call or e-mail us at Snobappealjewelry@yahoo.com.

I have a good track record in identifying rocks and minerals, especially from the Great Lakes area. I’m not a know-it-all type person, but I have seen a lot of rocks and minerals in my day. Our website is an example of the variety of stones we use.

I generally do not use common jewelry store gems; ours are usually much more rare. My rock club friends, and others, will ask me to attempt an ID for them.

At our recent Club Show a random shopper was referred to me by another club member to identify some odd looking stones. She had an old bracelet from a garage sale; the stones falling off a base metal finding. I identified the stones as Thomsonite from the North Shore of Superior. Most of the cabs were small rounds, but the main cab was a very unusual, pastel Thomsonite, sporting a red banding not unlike a Lake Superior Agate.

I asked her what she was going to do with the stones (I was not interested in the metal, which looked like it came from the kids table), as they were loose in a bag. She decided to swap the stones for a bracelet we were selling. Sometimes a stone calls me to create jewelry immediately, and this was the case with this Thomsonite. It was so unusual for a Thomsonite, at first glance I though it was an agate.

I knew what I was going to do with the main stone when I traded for it. The only concern was the stability of the Thomsonite. The stone was thick, and Thomsonite is fairly brittle with an iffy crystal structure at times. Thomsonite does not tolerate harmonic vibrations, and requires careful cutting, grinding, and polishing.

First I used a 4″ ProSlicer high speed saw blade. ProSlicers are thin, for cutting valuable material. I used a .012 blade to cut the Thomsonite. Water and a couple drops of coolant are a must. I carefully sliced the Thomsonite, but a small piece broke off, turning a round stone into one with a flat side. The majority of the gemstone remained intact. I’d rather a gemstone break early in the process. I can’t begin to count the stones I’ve rejected over the years, because they did not live up to my standards. In many cases a customer would not even know there was a problem, BUT I DO. I refuse to sell substandard jewelry.

After a Thomsonite was sliced, the breakage can still occur. Grinding wheels must be broken in and only the soft wheels on the Genie or Pixie (lapidary machines) can be used (remember the harmonic issue?). Happily, the grinding and polishing turned out well.

The Thomsonite could have been a stand-alone pendant, but I love to upgrade if I can. In this case the upgrade was an gorgeous Isle Royale Greenstone, collected off the island 50 years ago; swinging from the bottom of the Thomsonite. This Thomsonite and Greenstone Pendant turned out amazing. If a pendant turns out amazing, I feel amazing, and I know the customer will feel amazing! Life is good!

It turns out identifying a random baggie of garage sale stones could be reworked to something stunningly beautiful! You can own and love the finished product! Visit our Thomsonite page today!

Explore our wide selection of Greenstone Cabochons, Greenstone Pendants and Greenstone Earrings as well as Thomsonite and other jewelry from Keweenaw Minerals

Ledge Agate, Keweenaw Agate or Brockway Mountain Agate

SISU is a Finish word we hear often in the Upper Peninsula. It means going beyond ones’ Mental or Physical threshold. Most Lake Superior Agates are fairly easy to harvest, but Keweenaw Ledge agates require quite a bit of digging, pounding, and more digging and pounding work, to obtain. They require a lot of SISU to harvest.

On a previous blog (circa 2013) I showed the adventures digging ledge agates from the base of Brockway Mountain. A type of paint Lake Superior Agate, found mostly south of Copper Harbor, and not well known. I found a pocket of red chunks of agate in a secret hole. When I got home, I put these buckets of Keweenaw Agate in my barn to work on “later” and they rose to the top when Bonnie was cleaning and neatening out there recently. I didn’t have time to work with them right away, but one piece was so unusual it went right to the saw. Of the many Ledge Agates I have cut and seen, I have not seen one like this agate. Ledge Agates are pretty unique, but this one goes beyond unique

Keweenaw Agates are generally opaque with a porcelain surface, and little or no fortification banding. This particular agate had those attributes, and also eyes surrounded by red agate. The base color of the agate is reddish, but it also had green in it, indicating a chlorite deposition in the agate. I cut it and made a pendant as you can see here. I am hopeful that as I rummage through these buckets of seam agate I will find other nice pieces from this lucky pocket.

It took 5 or 6 years to show you Keweenaw Agate from this hunt, but hopefully I’ll find more good stuff to show you later. I probably missed some of the nuances in this stone. Feel free to comment at whatever link source you got here from.

Read More:

video of rock huntint the Keweenaw Agate: https://www.snobappealjewelry.com/blog/category/keweenaw-peninsula/

When Bonnie comes to the shop all excited, it usually means she wants to show me something.

I was polishing a batch of Petoskey Stones when she appeared to tell me it was raining and all the my Greenstone-infested mine rocks were lit up with Greenstone. I had only a small pile of rubble outside that I have been working Greenstones out of them, off and on. Most of these rocks only have small Greenstone in them, and those I keep for teacher specimens. Sometimes a larger Greenstone may appear, and sometimes I see what appears to be a small Greenstone, and it turns out it’s really a big Greenstone. Let’s take a look:

Some of my tailings pile rock appears to be full of Greenstone, but it is full of, what most Greenstone hunters call “Half-baked Greenstone” or “Greenstone wannabes”. This material is dark and soft, showing no pattern. The wannabes usually occur in softer mine rock, whereas the good Greenstone occurs in hard rock (hard rock=hard greenstone). I’ve included a picture of this Half-baked material. This softer material may contain Chlorastrolite, but is mostly Chlorite. Unfortunately, like most of my fellow Greenstone hunters, I wasted a lot of time, over the years, on this half-baked dull junk. Not every green stone is our beloved gemstone Greenstone!

Today I found one rock that I could see had a Greenstone poking out from the surface. I thought, based on my experience, that I might be able to break the rock open, and the little Greenstone might pop out. I whacked that mine rock and I broke that small Greenstone right in half. IT WAS A BIG-UN! I don’t mind at all that the stone broke in half. Now I can make two Greenstones!

This particular Greenstone has a center filled with some type of Zeolite. Often the Zeolites in Greenstones is soft and rotten, but this stone seems to be solid. The extraction now involves carefully cutting out the stones. More work, but the rewards may be worth the extra effort. Based on the thousands of these I’ve cut, I will not get real excited unless the final gemstone is finished and really is a worthy Gemstone.

Because of my workload right now, I cannot show you a finished piece and we don’t know if it’s a winner or a loser. The end of this story will have to wait…sorry!

to be continued

“You can’t count on a Greenstone Gem until the finished stone comes off the polisher”-Don Reed 2019

You can read more about Greenstones:

The State Gem https://statesymbolsusa.org/symbol-official-item/michigan/state-gem-gemstone/isle-royale-greenstone

Inclusions in Greenstone https://www.snobappealjewelry.com/blog/the-shades-and-patterns-of-greenstone-chlorastrolite/

We pretty much covered the one end of the Strip of Hotel Shows along I-10 in Tucson Yesterday.  As You may recall, we park at a lot about midway along the Strip. Heres are numerous pictures of some of the wild and amazing things we saw.

This should catch us up on the Strip Shows (pun intended). Tomorrow we visit the Hotel Tucson City Center where we expect many fossils, speciments.

 

A small number of shows in Tucson open early, sometimes referred to as the super-start. These include the JOGS Gem and Jewelry Show, the 22^nd Street Show and the Hotel Tucson City Center. We attended the JOGS Gem and Jewelry Show today which is wholesale/ retail which requires credentials showing your status as a buyer. The JOGS show is located at the Tucson Expo Center, an easy location to get to. We skipped the initial rush, and the lines to register were not bad.

At African Arts I saw great Shattuckite, Malachite and Azurite.

We have favorite vendors there. One is Sunwest Silver, the home of more turquoise than you can imagine. Morenci Turquoise and turquoise prices in general are always surprising.   They had buckets of Campicos, Kingman, Kingston, Pilot Mountain, and Sleeping Beauty. They always have the biggest turquoise jewelry displays and a show-stopping gem. A natural blue topaz (around 10 pounds) could be had for somewhere around $20000. He also had some great opals, but the picture doesn’t show their true glory. They were stunning. (I always ask the vendors if it is OK to take my pictures).

I also enjoyed seeing Cripple Creek turquoise at Burtis Blue Turquoise of Cripple Creek, Co.      He had some great tiger iron slabs as well. The booths are really packed together and it is easy to get turned around.

John Higgins of Outer Space Rocks, from Santa Fe had nice assortment of shapes, sizes, and types of meteorites. His comment was that he wished he was in Michigan hunting the recent meteor fall.

We talked with some other shoppers from Ottawa, California, even back home from Leland, Michigan, close to our home in northwest Michigan. Check in tomorrow and see our further adventures at the Tucson Shows.

 

 

Treasures from Tucson Gem Shows

Fordite, as you probably know, is a general term used for the paint used for Vehicles and Boats back before the mid-70’s. to be precise, it is the overspray that was built up on carriages that carried vehicle bodies through the paint booths of the car and boat companies. This paint could also build up on the walls of the paint booths. I have been informed by knowledgable people that automotive paint still contains lead. I accept this truth, but also know that the lead content is reduced from back in the day. also clear coating seals the paint sprayed on todays cars.

Humans (not robots) painted metal vehicles, using leaded paints. The lead acted as a lubricant, allowed the paints to flow and paint smoothly. In the mid 70’s government regulations forced the car and boat companies into painting cars using the powdercoat method. Little or no paint buildup happened when powder coating. Shortly thereafter the job of painting cars was religated to robots.

Today, many unwary Fordite buyers are scammed by paint from overseas, created by these same robots used by the car companies. This paint IS NOT classic Fordite. The imported paint comes in colors that were never on cars from before the mid-70s. I think it is a real scam that they can even call this Fordite. Many otherwise honest jewelry makers have been sold imported Fordite as the real deal, and they will swear there stuff is real because someone that sold it to them told them it was the real deal. Most of you were not around in the 50s-70s, so some research on your part as to paint colors back then should be undertaken. Another tell-tale clue is that antique Fordite will show paper thin layers, while in faked Fordite the layers will be thick. Thick layers indicate that the paint was put on thick to save time. Normally real Fordite has as many as ten layers to one layer in the imported stuff.

A good frind of mine sells real antique Fordite, as well as many other cabs in Tucson. He has been in the rock business for 60 years and has some good old stuff. This year he had some odd Fordite that was used to paint yellow cabs (Taxis) back in the 50s. I was able to obtain a few pieces. I like the unusual stuff and this Fordite is definately that. it had some blues in it also and a couple other colors.

I suspect the place that painted yellow cabs may have painted other fleet vehicles also. The blue resembles greyhound bus blue from the 50’s (I cross referenced the fleet color charts).

Enjoy the “Yellow Cab” paint and the Yellow Cab jewelry from Yellow Cabs (cabochons).

I have made some suggested changes in this blog. I cannot verify the source of the new Fordite I saw in Tucson this year. These pieces were all gaudy bright, sometimes metallic cabs that were never seen on any car, except perhaps a custom paint job on a show car. I have always believed the real deal Fordite was used in the Automotive plants (and sometimes boat factories ) from before the installation of Robots powder coating vehicles. Now days it seems any paint-layered pieces are being called “Fordite”. I guess it’s up to the buyers to determine if indeed the new stuff is “Fordite” or not. I try to use only paint I know came from the automotive plants prior to 1980, that were sprayed on primarily metal, by humans. I try to also find the color charts for the paint (Fordite I sell).

There is controversy as to what constitutes “Fordite”. To me, the real stuff is the old stuff, but it’s up to you to decide. I will admit that some of this new Fordite is spectacular and I would have no qualms in using it for jewelry, but I would also be straight up and tell buyers it may not be automotive colors from back in the day. Research still underway, by me. on this issue.

Some buyers really care; I’ve been told by many things like “My uncle so & so”, or my dad painted cars at Fisher Body”, and they really car about where a piece originated. Some want a piece of real history and some just want a nice colorful Fordite irregardless where it originate. Buyers should ask questions and accertain they are getting what they want. A knowledgeable seller will know his stuff.

Thanks to the Fordite afficionados that contacted me on this.