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Price: AU$ 287 (free worldwide shipping)
This necklace is, like all of our other pieces, a one-off design, intended for a woman that appreciates individuality and commitment to quality. The beads for this substantial necklace have been collected all over the world and put together to create a piece of strong contrast. The piece contains, amongst others, these semi-precious beads:
- The focal points of this necklace are five spines of a Slate Pencil Sea Urchin, which we purchased on a small market in Madang Province in Papua New Guinea. Whilst almost all sea Urchins have long sharp and venomous spines this species has in changed tactics to produce thick blunt spines. Each spine (when not totally bleached after long exposure on a beach) has a beautiful ring pattern, giving it a unique “signature”.
- Lava beads from Indonesia. Lava beads start life as molten rock of over 1,000 degrees Celsius. Because of the air entrapped in the flowing lava these eye-catching beads are surprisingly light.
- Although the ore for Turquoise (stabilized and bleached) comes from California, these beads have been sourced from China. Owing to a culture of thousands of years of bead making, some of the world’s best lapidaries are still found in China. Chemically speaking, these stunning beads are turquoise stone – minus the copper components – and as such they appear white, rather than bluish green. While the world knows and trades these stones as stabilized & dyed Turquoise, these semi-precious beads are technically speaking made from Howlite. Howlite is characterized by eye-catching contrasting charcoal veins, and because it is very porous, it takes up dye easily to look lustrous in its own right.
- Fossilized Crinoids – early stalked relatives of feather stars sometimes called water lilies that lived in the world’s ocean since the Ordovician period 490 million years ago. Because their stalk is made from calcareous material and the ocean sediment is an ideal environment for Crinoids to become fossilized, every circle on the grey coloured bead represents a perfect cross-section through one animal. These beads were sourced in Hong Kong.
- Foraminifera discs– the calcareous remains of one of the largest single cell marine organism in the world bought on a small market in Porta Vila, Vanuatu.
- Tiny Shark vertebrae, collected from a beach in Tunisia, North Africa. Shark vertebrae have been used in jewellery all over the world from Africa, to Hawaii or New Zealand.
- Stick Biwa pearls and button Pearls, produced by the freshwater triangle mussel (Hyriopsis cumingii) near Shanghai, China. The beads are produced by grafting tissue of foreign mussels into the triangle mussel, which responds to this intrusion of foreign protein by producing the lustrous nacre bead.
- Dark blue Jasper from India. Jasper, which belongs to the Quartz family is one of the oldest known gemstones, and was very popular in ancient times. It has been written about in very early Greek, Hebrew, Assyrian, Persian and Latin publications, as well as the Bible.
- A fossilized Ammonite, perhaps the most widely known fossil with an eye-catching ribbed spiral.
- Four different types of agate are part of this necklace: Large blue and white inter-layered Agates, a Druzy Agate with crystals (blue), crab fire Agate (brown) and faceted Agate (blue balls) from Brazil.
- Sterling silver plated and Tibetan silver beads sourced from South Korea.
