The Gem, Fossil, and a lot of other Geologic Stuff Day at Denver Coliseum

HI!

We started looking for a coffee table for the Great Room a while ago, and as you might remember, Deb and the girls were shopping .... and found a slab table for $3,600 that they thought was beautiful. I was called to drive to Evergreen to look it over, and pointed out that we could make one for a lot less and end up with a lot more. Deb took me up on that offer!

So, a trip to CS Hardwoods was in order (again). This time specifically for mesquite about 50" long x 30" wide. No luck (again) as all of the really nice mesquite wide enough for what we wanted was spoken for by some local artist who uses CS Hardwoods' policy of "holding" a piece ...... for as long as the "owner" wants .... ad infinitum ........ to keep us from finding the perfect piece. So, being ever resourceful, we decided to find a piece we could stick in the middle of an existing slab that was very nice but too narrow. Searching through dimensioned lumber, we found two 4" x 6" book matched pieces of mesquite. Even though different from the original slab, but beautiful in it's own right, we told CS Hardwoods to split the slab and insert the two book matched pieces. They were skeptical.

Notice that there are lots of "defects" in the piece in the form of worm holes, cracks, lines, and knots. We see these as opportunities ..... to learn about how to inlay these defects with turquoise. We've seen pictures of beautiful bowls, furniture, doors, etc. that have been inlaid and they are stunning!

We haven't done inlay before, and we checked .... many of the finest (read as "costly") furniture and art objects are inlaid with turquoise. In its natural state, turquoise comes in chunks - rocks - anywhere from a few ounces to many pounds. When it's ready for inlay, the turquoise is in very small chunks or slices, sized down to a powder that will go through a flour sieve. So, we have to learn how to take the rocks to chunks to dust without wasting any and still having useful pieces for the table.

Today we went to the Gem, Rock and Fossil show at Denver Coliseum to see if we could find turquoise for the table.

Denver Coliseum is a full-on music and show venue seating around 10,000 people. This show took up the whole concourse level, the whole floor level of the coliseum and spilled out into the parking lot with vendors in a hundred or so tents. Table after table after table of precious, semi-precious gems, tools, lapidary materials, imported specialty items, fossils, skulls with teeth, shark teeth from Megladon as big as you hand, ...... and necklaces made of coral, ivory, lapis, opals from Egypt, tourmaline, turquoise, peridot, amber with imbedded insects, ...... Amazing the diversity of materials!

Deb was looking and I was following. She stopped and was having a conversation with a lady about her "old pawn" Native American silver / turquoise jewelry, and I butted in, asking about how one knows which turquoise is "good" and which is "lower grade." The lady said to talk to her husband so I wandered over and struck up a conversation. The conversation got around to me asking him if he has any "seconds," shorts," chards," or the like for sale. He said he had a shoe box that had been in his garage for two years that he'd brought with him. He called it a "close-out" box and wanted $50 for two quart baggies full of turquoise rocks, a quart jar full of 1/4" minus turquoise rocks, and a medicine bottle full of small pieces that had been saw cut off of bigger chunks. I bargained him down to $40 for the box and we went on our way.

Later on, we were talking to a couple from Medford, OR and he was saying how hard it was to find good turquoise. He said it used to be easy, but now the mines were played out and closing down, so the supply was drying up. I told him about the box of turquoise, and he offers me $40 for one of the baggies that he said contain "good" turquoise. How nice for us ..... by a box full for $40, sell about a third of the contents for $40 .......

So we now have the turquoise. We just need to know how to place it in the table ....... more to come!

Cheers!