"Nixie's Crown" tiara by Maria Nilsdotter from the "Midsommar" collection with one branch growing down onto the cheek where a single tear hangs in silver with diamond, moonstone, amazonite, agate and clear quartz, 2021.
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Monday's Mineral: Feldspar Gemstones
Ah, gemstones, one of the banes of my existence as geologist. Don't get me wrong, I can appreciate their beauty but all the silly trade names that gemologists come up with for varieties of the same mineral drive me up the wall.
Anyway, feldspars can be gemstone quality if they are not broken down by natural processes first. There's only a couple that really matter: kspar, albite, and labradorite.
Moonstone is probably the most "valuable" of these gems. It is sometimes known as adularia due to it's adularescence (moonshine effect). This is caused by the orientation of albite crystals within orthoclase. It is usually colorless or white.
Sunstone resembles moonstone but has a golden color and a warm, shiny, golden adularescence. This is an albite gemstone, as is aventurine. Aventurine has a characteristic appearance of aventurescence, or a sparkly, metallic look.
Labradorite is a mixed plagioclase feldspar that exhibits labradorescence, reflected light caused by characteristic polysynthetic twinning of the mineral.
Finally, there is Amazonite, a microcline gemstone that usually green or light blue-green in color. It often exhibits perthite texture seen as white lines. Perthite texture occurs with exsolution or unmixing.
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Vase
Tiffany & Co.
1900
Inspired by the distinctive beauty of Native American art, Tiffany & Co.’s gifted designer G. Paulding Farnham created three highly unusual silver vessels for the firm’s grand prize-winning display at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle. The present vase is based on the design of Navajo pottery, its hand-raised silver body ornamented with semi-precious stones sourced in America: turquoise-colored amazonite and bluish opals, as well as hundreds of freshwater pearls embedded in the "corn-cob" handles. The vase was also exhibited the following year at the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition.
Paulding Farnham was one of Tiffany & Co.’s most talented designers of both jewelry and silver. Having been apprenticed to Tiffany’s artistic director Edward C. Moore around 1878, Farnham became the firm’s head jewelry designer in 1891 and continued to win gold medals at international fairs until departing the firm in 1904.
The MET (Accession Number: 2017.162)
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Piebald is a great gene, I should get more dragons with it
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Art Deco Brooch by D. van Hattem, ca. 1930-1940, The Hague, Netherlands. Made with amazonite, diamonds and partly enamelled silver.
(Source: rijksmuseum.nl)
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Will I ever get tired of getting new crystals? Never. 💎✨
(Yes, that's a labradorite Hello Kitty - the photo doesn't really do the amazing flash justice!) 🐱✨💎
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