i have been collecting rocks since my childhood, of course most of those have gone their separate ways over the years... my kids have brought me many over the years, as well... my house is filled with rocks, books and stuffed animals (mine and my kids')
i have a variety of rocks; cut gems, jewelry, eggs, spheres (actually, i am just beginning my collection of spheres), rough rocks, polished rocks and various crystal formations.
i believe not only in the beauty of my stones, but also in their healing properties.
i would like to learn about creating pieces of jewelry that i can wear, someday i will find the time.
i know that there are alot of mines around where i live, i live in the sierras and i know that nevada is full of mines, i just don't get out much.
i DO want to take a class to learn how to rate gemstones since i have begun to collect them. my purpose in doing that is as an alternative to carrying cash while travelling the world in our sailboat (that we haven't purchased yet... looking to the future :)
i have some demantoids and some charolite, i think those are my favorites so far. seraphanite is something i am buying now, along with aqua aura and a few others. i am not exactly in the money right now, so it is slow going. :P
Hi Dina, I have a lovely piece of Tigers Eye that I bought for my husband. Even unpolished it has a lovely shine to it. I would like to try cutting it one day and maybe doing some engraving on it. One day for now it will look nice sitting on his desk at work (after I polish it) and when he is having a bad day he can pick it up and play with it and chill. Jo
I don't hunt my own rocks much, although there's some nice stuff washed up on the beaches on the New Jersey shore where my parents live. Last summer there was rose quartz everywhere, a little bit of amethyst and rhodochrosite, and "Cape May diamonds" - glass-clear white quartz pretty enough for jewelry.
I don't make jewelry, I have zero skills for it; last time I tried putting a bloodstone in a silver setting, I got tool marks all over the silver, gave up, and sold the stone by itself. (For a nice profit, so at least it covered the price of the ruined setting!)
My current collection of rough crystals is a lot of diamonds I spent WAY too much money on, about 100ct of indicolite (about half is the real purple-denim blue kind, the rest have more green), a few pounds of fluorite octahedrons (polished and natural), and a pound of rose quartz spheres I just got and feel like I should be playing an expensive game of marbles with!
4seaturtles: you have demantoid? It's my favorite stone! I don't know if I'm allowed to ask this (I'm new to neighborhoods), but a diamond/demantoid trade would make me very happy!
I recently aquired a huge amount of amethyst. Apparently they are parts of a cathedral that was too large to move without cutting. Not sure what I am going to do with it yet. I will probably keep one large piece as a display piece, sell the smaller specimins off as display pieces and make boring jewelry out of the rest *snickers* Right now it is sitting in a laundry basket on some towels because I have nowhere to put it. I'm hoping to get out to the benitoite mine one of these days but I just heard something about it being closed because the BLM land has asbestos problems or something. I am really getting into cutting my own gems, lots of rewarding fun. My favorite rocks are probably opals and tourmaline.
LOL, I don't think *all* jewelry is boring, but people talking about nothing but how they're going to use the stones & not *appreciating* the stones does drive me bonkers :-) And then when they get into beading and all the varieties of beads there are my brain goes numb with incomprehension.
the*witches*britches - What kind of lapidary equipment do you have? I'd like to be able to cut stones someday, even if it's only cabochons. I don't know how to start learning, though!
Right now I use a handy dandy dremel tool with lots of over priced attachments as well as hand shapers and diamond files. I am saving up for a lap grinder and cutting wheel but OMG they are expensive. It takes me a week or more to cut and shape 1 stone so with the grinder and saw I am hoping it will go faster.
LIVING IN CENTRAL OREGON IS GREAT FOR ROCKHOUNDS. HOME OF THE "PETERSON ROCK GARDEN" IN REDMOND AND "RICHARSONS ROCK RANCH" UP OUT OF MADRAS WHERE THE PRIDAY PLUME BEDS ARE.I MINE PLUME AGATE,JASPAGATE WITH GOLD IN IT(TRACE) AND RAINBOW IRIS AGATE....A POWERFUL METAPHYSICAL STONE.LINK MY STORE WITH EBAY ITEM #300182848968(highdesertgift).I ALSO HAVE AGATE SLABS ON dragonsayeauctions.com
I've been collecting since I was a kid, mostly by mail order back in the pre-interweb days. Nothing beat a trip down to the Smithsonian with a wallet full of allowance when their natural history gift shop was so awesome. It's pretty weak now with big bins of polished and dyed pebbles for the kids and onyx dishes.
Maryland has plenty of fossils which I have tons of and calcite from the limestone quarries. Calvert Cliffs is a nice fossil area but I don't know if it's still legal to hunt there. There were tons of tiny quartz formations and fossils at my great uncle's cabin in WV. Now I'm mostly into petrified woods/limb casts, but still into all of it. I'm very interested in meteorites but scared to death to buy one.
I get to look around when my band is on the road. Whenever we hit a rest stop I head for the hills. I'll be rolling out for some digging next trip to AZ to stay with the in-laws.
I've 'green' collected (money for specimens) at shows and rockhound shops across the USA. Even used my 'free' time on business trips to visit rock shops, shows, museums.
Collecting in the Southeast is still great. Rose Quartz, schorl tourmaline, blue quartz, rutile, corundum, pyrite cubes, kyanite, marble, granite, staurolite, garnets from golfball to softball size, fossils, amethyst, quartz crystals, agates, etc. - all for the price of a tank of gas from Atlanta.
Unfortunately, the best specimens are rare. Many come from deep inside commercial mines. You have to buy the best quality specimens. But the ones I have collected personally are treasured more highly than all but a few 'green collected' ones.
hi, new to ebay, and to cutting rocks, me and my husband have collected rocks for awhile, him longer than me, we bought equipment from an estate and we are having fun cutting the rough that we got in the deal. Will be selling some soon as we get the hang of ebay. glad there is a place to talk to others that share the love of rocks.
I too am new at being a rock hound. Guess that makes me a pebble pup, lol! Hope to learn great things from those of you that have been doing this for alot longer. I live in southern La. and the only acsess I have rocks are from the gravel pits where they are dredged from the ground. I am still learning how to identify what I'm looking at. So I hope yall will be patient with a newbie.
Cedar I have a friend who used to live in LA and would find the most beautiful Louisiana 'swamp opals' you've ever seen. He said they can be found in and around the swamp or marsh land.... they are out there just gotta look for em
Hi, I opened my eyes to the natural beauty of rocks about 10 to 15 years ago, and I am happy I did. I work for a jewelry company selling jewelry of course but, I mostly like to collect these gems in their natural form and I love to see the differences and show them off to others I work with. This is now my passion.
Hi Guys, nice to see you here, too, I colected rocks and stones most of my life, I would love to learn how to cut stones, one of these days I have to find me some books about it, any suggestions?? As for my love of making Jewelry, you have to appreciate the beauty of a stone in order to make a special piece of Jewelry, Glass beads do not attract me it's the natural beauty of the stone I'm after....Jewelry can enhance the beauty of a stone,+ it makes it wearable.... Any one know where I can get my hands on my new favorite stone,, Larimar, I have looked around some, and the prizes are outrageous,
As for mining, dont know if there is mining in Florida??? You dig four feet down and you hit water, that's after four feet of sand that is, Seashells, there are alot of seashells aroud here, and some coral, and seaglass....LOL Edi
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