Well, thanks to all of you lovely customers, I can offer even better prices on my 6-6.5mm half-drilled button pearls. They are now $0.75, down from $0.85 with great discounting if you buy in bulk, up to 30% off. As I replace my old stocks of pearls, I am hoping to bring down prices across the range and will notify as and when that happens. Also newly listed today are 4-4.5mm and 6-6.5mm loose white round pearls, full-drilled. Check it all out at www.joopygems.com.
I have a large amount of new stock coming in, and I’m hoping it’s going to be here by next week before everyone goes on holiday in August. So, no pictures as yet, but look forward to the following:
Lots and lots of stuff to keep a look out for – I will be posting as and when it comes in.
These earrings are just incredible; made by L. Sue Szabo using the old fashioned technique of foiling. She has placed coloured foils behind white topazes (supplied by me!) in a modern day revival of the old technique for colouring rhinestones back in the 1920s. She wanted to see what would happen if she used beautiful gems instead and I think they look fantastic. I for one know that the topaz is completely clean and in addition, she has sealed the coloured foil in resin to ensure that it does not fade. I really like the old-style elegance of the filligree settings and the way that they really make those colours pop. You can find these at www.etsy.com/shop/lsueszabo and see more of her award winning designs.
I love to see what people make with ‘my’ stones, so please keep the pictures coming in.
I’ve been very quiet recently, I know. It’s because I’ve been away, and then when I returned, was so backed up with orders and admin that I feel I have been struggling to surface. Oh, and we moved house as well. Anyway, after a month of freezing and shivering in the UK (10 degrees, raining. Raining sideways, no sensible clothes/shoes packed for me or the Critter) we are back to the opposite extreme, steamy hot Hong Kong. But just to give you an idea of my travels, heres a picture of my husband, mum and child, like True Brits, picnicking in the rain.
Actually, my husband is Canadian so shortly after this photo was taken, he said ‘This is depressing, I’m going to the cafe’ and so we traipsed off after him without putting up much of a fight. My blood has definitely thinned after several years in Hong Kong. That house in the background is sadly not the family seat; it’s Parham House in Sussex and it has beautiful walled gardens, lovely mixed beds bursting with colour (which the husband nonetheless described as ‘messy’).
It also had a kind of summer house/wendy house built into the garden wall, which the Critter absolutely loved, could hardly get her out of it. Apparently, every summer, the lady of the house organises a barbeque for her children and they stay there overnight and tell each other ghost stories.
We also went to a place called Mottisfont Abbey , famous for its collection of old shrub roses, left the husband at home for that one, good thing as it turned out as the higgledy-piggledy planting and trusses of heavy-headed blooms shedding their scent into the summer air may have caused him to have a conniption fit. He’d have been in there with his long-handled pruners, back-hoe and graph paper.
They also had, to my great happiness, my favourite rose of all time:
This is called ‘Mme Pierre Oger’ and is an old fashioned Bourbon Rose. It’s got terrible resilience to disease and is horribly prone to black-spot but it is such a delicate colour; those pearly white petals blushed with pink. It’s got that beautiful globular shape as well, the petals furling tightly around each other, and best of all, the scent is sweet and intoxicating.
We also had a visit to London (picture of me with the Critter and my niece), went crabbing and had some fun making sand-castles in the dunes (the observant viewer will notice that it has by now stopped raining – this merely reflects the fact that this was our last week in Blighty, so obviously the sun came out and apparently shone for a good couple of weeks after we left…!)
Right, that’s it for now, before you all think this has turned into a gardening blog. Next time it will be something gemstone/jewellery related, I promise!
Just to be clear, I am here referring to stones…! In particular, blue and green tourmaline which I am sure I have mentioned before, are very popular right now. When I picked up this last lot I mentioned as much to my supplier, and he – a very gentle and gracious man – gave me a look that managed to be both sage and conspiratorial and said ‘People want things that are hard to get’. How true, and not just for stones. Certainly, sourcing these stones is not merely a matter of waltzing into the supplier’s office and saying, ‘I’ll take 500 carats of the blue and green tourmaline, please.’ No. First of all I have to buy a largish amount of something else, then I have to ask the supplier if he will very kindly allow me to plunder his bags of mixed colour tourmalines and cherry-pick the ones I want. Suppliers don’t normally like this sort of thing because there is the danger that you will take the best stuff and leave them with the crud. So, this means two things; firstly that my supplier is a very nice man, and secondly that I really cannot guarantee the supply of these colours. So, at risk of sounding like a used car salesman, if you like it, grab it, because I don’t know when or if I will get some more. I have 4mm and 6mm round cabochons in a variety of shades; pale aquas and greens through to teals and deep blues. Lovely.
Someone suggested ages ago that I should stock small cabochons, by which I mean 3mm, and I did not do it; I thought they would not sell. Well, it just goes to show what I know because when I finally did get some in, they were unbelievably popular! So, I tucked into a healthy slice of humble pie and ordered some more; more varieties of stone, in greater numbers. All of the above are 3mms, ranging from Apatite to Turquoise (plus some others that didn’t fit into my nice matrix above – eg ruby an sapphire). I’ve also got some London Blue Topaz as well that I have not yet photographed and listed, but coming this week. And I will entertain any other requests for stones in this size as clearly you guys know alot better than I do what you want. Funny, that! Check them all out at www.joopygems.com
I’m going to be completely honest about this; I hate photographing apatite. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve been waiting for ages for this stuff to come in and now that it has, I find it it impossible to stop looking at it. The colour is so fantastic, especially since it is untreated, and the stones so clean that it appears almost unreal. And can I capture this quality? Can I heck. My camera (extremely good in so many ways) is not at is best in the aqua colour range, and I can’t get the glassy shine of the stones either. So I’m going to ask you to take my word for it. These stones are fabulous. Eye-catching and unique, and I have them in a 4mm and a 6mm cabochon. Even more exciting, I have rose cuts of these sizes on order; keep your eyes peeled for those!
This is my first foray into precious stones – I have generally steered clear mainly due to expense. But they have a kind of glamour and mystique that exerts a certain pull, so when I was visiting a supplier recently and he produced them, I somehow could not resist. So we have emeralds, sapphires and rubies, all cabochon cut. The emeralds are a nice shade of green with that desirable bluish tint. Included of course; you expect inclusions with stones that don’t cost an arm and a leg, but actually considering this, the clarity is pretty good and so is the lustre. The sapphires are lovely; a good azure blue with a little colour zoning but saturated colour throughout the stones. The rubies I am especially fond of; a lovely pinkish red with good clarity and lustre and none of the greyish cast that ruby cabochons can display. I have the emeralds in a 3mm, the sapphires in a 3mm, 4mm and 5mm and the rubies in a 3mm and a 4mm.
I love it when people send me photographs of the beautiful things they have made from the stones they have bought from me. Stones always look incomparably better when set, and their natural beauty properly framed. This ring is a design by Trina Allen of TLA Designs; an 8mm pink tourmaline in a soft apricot shade, bezel set in sterling silver with a lovely hammered band. Lovely clean, elegant lines which set off the warm pink of the stone beautifully, and you know, the older I get, the more I like pink. It’s happy and uplifting and it makes you smile, so chuck out that basic black; spring is here, the blossom is blooming and it’s pink all over!
You can visit Trina’s shop here: http://www.etsy.com/shop/tladesigns and you can find more tourmaline in my shop at www.joopygems.com
I’ve said it before, but tourmaline is so popular right now; the range of colours and colour mixes is unparalleled in any other gemstone. Here is a selection of some of the tourmalines I have in stock – there are many more on the website and I will be adding more over the next few days. Any one of these stones are unique and would make an incredible statement in any piece of jewellery. There’s a few inclusions – less in the bi-colour rubellite, which is higher grade material, but I think if you love tourmaline, then you have to love the inclusions too, because clean material is so scarce and therefore so expensive. If you want to know why the price of tourmaline is sky-rocketing, I am told that it is currently very desirable in China and they are buying it up by the 1000s of carats! You can find the full range I carry here: Bi-colour tourmalines
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