Tucson 2013: Part II

As promised, today I'm sharing some of the other goodies from the most recent shopping trip:

Turquoise...gorgeous turquoise. I found the above, and these:

I LOVE the striking blue color against the dark host rock. They're so different from the turquoise I usually see and buy. But don't worry, turquoise lovers, I bought a LOT of other turquoise too:

Though I bought quite a bit of the traditionally blue turquoise, I found myself gravitating to greens as well. I love the bold bright blues, but these subtle greens really caught my eye. 

This is how a lot of the stones are sold - taped or glued to cardboard. Which is fine...unless you don't want ALL the stones on each piece of cardboard. Then you have to either purchase them all anyway, or ask the seller to allow you to cut out the stones you want...sometimes they're nice about it and sometimes they're not. In this grouping, I loved them all and am thinking of making a big necklace with them, so I bought the whole card. Same for the stones below:

I had a hard time finding good earring stones this year - a lot of them were cut weirdly. I wish I could explain it better, but they just were off and I knew it would take extra work on my part to make them hang right. So I put tons of not-good-enough stones back into the bins and didn't bring home as many as I'd like. But these above are all so wonderfully matched, and I like the coloring of each one, so they came home with me. I am thinking the ones third from the right will be great with the first pendant posted above.  :)

I bought a lot more turquoise...a LOT more. I think I should be stocked up for a while now...

And while we're looking at turquoise, check out THESE beauties:

Royston / ribbon / boulder turquoise. Incredibly hard to find. And often very pricey when you do find it. This is turquoise that is not cut out of the host rock (the boulder). Instead, the stone cutter plans his or her cutting so that the "ribbon" of turquoise is the highlight. Thus the term "ribbon turquoise". Also known as boulder turquoise and Royston turquoise because most of this type of turquoise comes from the Royston mine in Nevada.

I liked the thought of them as earrings...but:

I think they may be even better as pendants.  :)

Another gorgeous pair. These may be the prettiest of all the ones I found.

A slightly more subtle pair. I should point out that though I only found Royston / boulder turquoise at three stone sellers in all of Tucson. Now, I can't possibly go to every show that takes place, but I went to six or seven shows, with hundreds or thousands of sellers. This stuff just isn't easy to come by. And it's definitely more expensive than most of the other turquoise I buy.

But they're so gorgeous...and you get what you pay for. These may have to be set into some very special pieces...

More goodies in the next post, and then back to business as usual.  :)