Bisbee Turquoise
I have written about how much I love turquoise and thought it might be nice to show some of the stones I have. Bruce Mead, bisbeerockman@embarqmail.com ,visits regularly and always has something wonderful to look at and buy. I have an addiction to good turquoise. I comb through the Tucson Gem Show every year for turquoise and am always on the look out for it from any source. Since Bisbee is 6o miles away from my studio I have a special place in my heart for it. It is as local a turquoise as I can get.
The box shown above has what I would consider gold grade stone, as well as one or two platinnum stones. I have silver grade as well. This is the kind of material I have to look at for inspiration. Bisbee is tough to match sets from but there is a 4 stone set in the box above with a spiderweb style matrix. I used most of that set to make the pendant I Blogged about recently which is available at the Arizona Inn, 520-235-1541. That set was put into 18K gold vine pattern pendant on an 18K collar.
Bruce recently went to Nevada and mined some Royston turquoise and brought me a few fantastic pieces.
Royston Turquoise
Large pieces of American turquoise are hard to find so when ever I see it I try to buy it. The Bisbee I would use for cluster work or individual smaller jewelry pieces. The large Royston pictured above is a rarity for me to have. On first glance I would say it is a pendant stone but it could also go into a bracelet or belt buckle. The other two pieces in the picture don’t match each other so they would go into individual pieces.
Bruce was just in this morning and I bought 3 larger pieces of Bisbee, bright blue with little matrix. They match each other, so what am I going to make? Maybe a bracelet.
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Leslie Litt 11.26.08 at 8:33 am
You don’t have any sleeping beauties???