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The Art By The Ferry Show will be coming up the first two weekends in June. I have been making a number of new pieces of jewelry for the event. Now that the Friends of Fire Store is open I have pieces there as well as the Red Carpet Gallery on Castleton, both of the establishments are on Staten Island.

The first pieces are Part of the fluorite collection I have been making for summer wear.  The fluorite beads are always cool to the touch and come in colors ranging from clear to greens and purples. A few of the beads will have several colors in them in bands or stripes.

This is an eggplant or deep amethyst colored  necklace. I chose the beads to make an elegant monochromatic statement. All the wires and findings are sterling silver, I make the hooks myself.

The next piece is more typically colored Fluorite showing a good range of the colors.

In person, these are all shades of green, the camera and lighting don’t do them justice. I added flashing hammered silver rings to make the piece sparkle as well as glow.

This last piece is made with Dragon Skin Agate. I like the reticulated character of the markings in the stone. The earth tones will compliment  almost every colored outfit, I like to make things that can be worn daily in stead of being saved for a night out or special occasion.  This is being old as a set too.

The  2010 New York Gem and Mineral Show was held last weekend at the Holiday Inn on 57th  Street. It’s usually one large room with a varied collection of vendors selling everything from mineral specimens, many are museum quality, to flawless faceted stones ready for use in jewelry.

This is a typical display of  moderately priced specimens.

And this is beginning to look like major display specimens for collectors and museums. 

The jewelry club is planning a digging trip to Herkimer,  New York, before this I had only seen herkimer ‘diamonds’ (exceptionally clear quartz) up to about 10 mm.  These pieces are huge, the herkimer crystals are unusual because they are doubly terminated and usually short in comparison to quartz found in other places. The crystal in the center of this picture  was marked at $300, something that made me take notice.  It is apparently rare to find crystals of this size. The crystals are  formed very slowly in pockets left by decaying bacteria/algae(?) clumps from a pre-dinosaur age.  When a pocket is opened,  it is found to be filled with a clayey soup that may contain hundreds of crystals,  hopefully large ones, that you have to strain or search through to find the ‘diamonds’.

This was new this year, loaves of jasper from China. There were also a number of specimens from Pakistan and Afghanistan which I thought was surprising given the current political /war situation.

Here are some more of the large specimens followed by a photo of minerals whose colors I like.

Aquamarines have been a recent passion. Here are some large aquamarine crystals in a bed of another mineral.

The translucent pink stone is also a beryl,  Morganite.  There are yellows  and greens too, the best greens are Emeralds.

This is a Brazilian Ballas Diamond crystal.  I’d like to be able to wear it. This one comes from John Betts, a dealer in smaller specimens of the highest quality.  His web site is a little difficult to navigate if you are just looking but it has beautiful photos of his specimens, separated by class and price  if you know what you want.

here’s a John Betts specimen of Aquamarine.

The next specimens are from  Raj Minerals, Inc. I find his displays breathtaking, he always has large pieces of the most unusual minerals.  The website is not as full as I would like to see and my photos are better but he does list the shows where he will be selling and it is really worth the trip to see these  minerals. The tags in the photos are the prices,

This is a detail of the stone in the photo below it.

As i was leaving I spied these thick slabs lying on a table near the exit.  nice bright color combinations.

I think Ocean Jasper is my favorite jasper, this piece is about an inch thick and about 7″ across.

As we left the Holiday Inn the weather was very clear.  The Time Warner towers loomed over the skyline like huge crystals of dark aquamarine.

The past week has been very busy. I delivered 90 invitations that I made in two days, yesterday; that’s after a weekend in which I bound 20 books from ink jet prints with hard paper covers and photos, built a box for them and made a logo out of sterling for the box. That project was delivered Sunday night. Here’s a photo of the project, I’ve blurred the marks on the cover to keep my client’s project private.

  It’s Thursday night and I have been in classes at FIT since yesterday’s evening. During the day, after delivering the invitations, I walked downtown on Broadway, crossing 23rd Street at Fifth Avenue to buy some materials for the next job. The first thing I noticed was that the ‘Silver Trees’ sculptures were being taken down in Madison Park. The dismantled trunk was on a huge flatbed truck, another truck held two boulder sculptures.  

    The second new thing is a tower going up on 23rd Street in the shadow of the Met Life Tower.  It’s getting to be like that all over lower Manhattan.  You can look down Fourth Avenue from East 10th Street near Astor place and see a number of towers rising over a large area of  Little Italy and Chinatown.  It’s disturbing to see my sunny old neighborhood being chilled by the shadows of gleaming towers. 

 Looking down Broadway I was surprised to see David Beckham in his underwear, smoldering on a roof top, keeping watch on the traffic from 22nd Street.  I think that’s a new billboard,  haven’t seen anything like that outside of Soho or Times Square.

 It’s about a 12 block walk to New York Central Art Supply and I like the walk down Broadway.  I pass  ABC  Carpet and Home and like to stop in there to see what is new.  Shouldn’t have been surprised to see that their buyers had been to Tucson for the mineral show.  Their purchases were all over the first floor,  they had found some things I hadn’t seen, like these slabs of  quartz that they are using as table mats or platforms. 

 The other things of interest were the piles of hand wrought metal bowls and chargers. The bowls aren’t expensive so I assume they are nickel silver or silver plate. But the leaves you see on the table are sterling, they are priced at $150 and  $180 each. All the leaves are individuals, cast from different leaves. The round ones, about 5-6 inches across, are especially handsome. They are resting on slabs of petrified wood. 

 A little further down Broadway the farmer’s market was running, this first stall with the tulips and daffodils in pots made me feel like Spring is not far away. 

 After shopping at Central, I headed up to 46th street to get supplies for tonight’s casting class. Having made the necessary purchases at Metalliferous, I walked around the corner to see if Tony had been shopping  for beads in Tucson. He had been, his side of the store has almost doubled in size, he showed me some of the Tucson material and while we were talking, my friend Irma said hello. It was a surprise to see another Staten Island artist in this special shop. We left together, walked to the train, got out at FIT, shopped for a sushi dinner at  Wholefoods and then ate in the student cafe at FIT. It’s rare that we have so much time to talk and catch up with each other. It was really pleasant. She left to go to a gallery talk and I went upstairs to my Gemology class.   

I’m at the Tucson airport with a lot of time before our flight to Houston, we change there and will arrive Newark about 1:30AM. The airport wireless is free here unlike Newark and Phoenix, so I’m taking time to edit photos and add to the blog.We met George at the Convention Center to see the big displays of minerals, after we got to the floors it looked like there was mostly jewelery displays and jewelers suppliers of cut stones. A little further inside the mineral displays began to appear.There were some grand displays like this one of amazonite from various mines. 

Large impressive specimens in abundance.

I thought I would try to find examples of minerals in a classic crystal formation. Here are some of them. 

This is Anglesite with Malachite.

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This is a nice presentation of small quartz crystals on florite.

I found some emerald dealers from Bogota. They had some nice stones and I asked if they had any trappiche Emeralds. They did and showed me these cabochons. The light colored stones were about $98/carat, the darker ones in the next photo were about $108/carat. I didn’t buy any, fascinating as they are, they aren’t the color or size of the specimens I saw in a book on gems at the Smithsonian. It might make a nice ring but I didn’t fall in love with any of them (the stones were between 1.5 and about 3 carats each.

Then they handed me a piece of trappich emerald in the matrix, it’s obviously not a gem stone but the form is very nice.

We left the convention center and went back to the Inn Suites show as we hadn’t  seen it all on our first visit and the displays were as good  but less pricy than the vendors at the center. Here’s George standing among the larges lingam stones I have ever seen, some of these were over 6 feet long.

When we broke for a mid-afternoon bite to eat, Colman and I went back to the bar. There was a cashier, and then there was a waitress, while we were being waited on the cashier was still behind the bar, we thought they were one person doing both jobs until we saw two of them at the same time. I asked to take their picture for Colman’s neices to see.

We arrived in Tucson about mid day on Tuesday, Colman picked up our rental car and we drove out to Mary Jane and David’s home just out side the city limits in the shadow of the Catalina mountains. It is good to be back, the air is clean and bright with sunlight. After settling in, we took a walk around the neighborhood, here are two of Colman’s photos.

Wednesday we met with George, who had already been in Tucson since Monday, to go to the Mineral Show which takes over the city for the first two weeks of February. Our first stop was at the Inn Suites, where all the rooms were turned into little showrooms for fossils, minerals and gems. There was a big show in the ballroom and little shows were in every nook and cranny of the lobby. As we tripped into the building we passed a brown tent with this trilobite welcome mat guarded by 2 large quartz crystals.

Here’s Colman and George in the first room we visited.

Spessartine and Smoky Quartz

Microcline v. Amazonite Smoky Quartz

An unusual specimen of Calcite and quartz.

Pyrite on Quartz

Green Apophyllite

This is one of many large fossils on display. 

One end of the ballroom was dedicated to the fossil sellers. There are vendors there who are selling casts of fossils as well as the real fossil bones. The large turtle is impressive, the full spectrum ammonite fossils from Canada are there along with a sea full of crinoid fossils.

I heard guys talking about this piece of ancient sea bed, saying it took about 100 hours to clean it up to show the fossils. I’m thinking, only a hundred hours?

I found these beautiful fossils in a room showing a collection of work from Germany. It took me completely by surprise, I am used to seeing thes type of fossils as flat cockroachy things and had no idea that the living animals had antennae, tendrils(?) and tails.

Outside, in front one of the tents, these Indian river stones were laying down. There were hundreds of them in all sizes from about 2 inches to 50 inches. We saw even larger ones the next stop in Electric Park, up to 78 inches, also a part of a display of hundreds.

As we left the Inn Suites I stopped into the Brown tent at the entrance where I bought some ammonite pairs and a sand dollar that had finger-like protuberances aling one edge. This croc like fossil was centrally placed in the tent.

The first thing we saw at the Electric Park show was this split geode of Citrines

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Here’s a shot of the passage into the park, it’s amazing to see and walk through these large specimens. This is only one side of the passage into the park, the other side was just as full of crated specimens.

This is how the show is set up in Electric Park, There was also a section of vendors in RV’s in an adfjacent parking lot.