Christmas rocked, but not entirely in a puntastic way...

[Snakeadelic]

Not much of my Christmas had to do with shiny rocks this year, but a few did show up!  As with many things in my life, they have a back story...

I remember the chunk of stone, I think.  It was definitely a pale lilac color and translucent with faintly visible banding, and I'm pretty sure it had some druzy quartz on it.  It had been cut and polished only on the cut side, and at some point after I acquired the original it broke up into several major and a few minor pieces.  I have no previous background on it, other than knowing it was "old stock" material when I got it probably 20 years ago.  I took a hunk to the awesome old dude who has a Farmers' Market booth where he sells his lapidary & jewelry work alongside his wife's fiber arts.  I had totally forgotten about it until my best lady friend here in the valley brought these by; she'd had them since the end of summer because our local lapidary (Ed, I think?) knows I hang out with her.  She did say he mentioned it was an agate-hard stone and very valuable but he could not remember a name.

The cabs are mostly lavender or lilac, with several whiter individuals.  The biggest oval has distinct banding, and the third-largest oval shows markings I've seen called 'turtlebacking' in a lot of online agate cabochon descriptions.  Both should be pictured if I did this right :).  My best guess is it's one of the played-out Mexican treasures, maybe poorly-banded Royal Aztec?  Could be something like non-dendritic Amethyst Sage.  This stone is decidedly not pale blue in any light, though under a 60 watt household white light with white paper underneath them several have a pinkish cast.

I would MUCH rather swap than sell.  I've pulled 5 cabs out from the group shown, all of them oval cabs and none of them the largest 3.  Individual pics can easily be arranged if anyone would like.  I don't need most of these and would love to know they'd found an appreciative home.  I'll swap the whole lot or individual bits, no problem.  I'm not new to swapping via mail and still have a document file (available by email) of my 81 confirmed trading references from a non-lapidary/gem site, all of them at a 5 out of 5 trader rating.  I will expect to send first for a good long while, which is also no problem for me, and I'll pay shipping on my end--and possibly yours if I want the trade badly enough :D.

As for what I want to trade for, that would be a very long list!  I make tiny twisted-wire trees, and drilled chips are a major want-list item, especially oddball stones not often seen in beadcraft stores.  I also use huge amounts of tiny broken scrap stone, chips with drill-failure problems, and pebbles all the way up to maybe 2 inches on the longest axis.  If anyone is or knows a lapidary fond of carving, teeny tiny leaves made of absolutely anything, green or not, would probably cause me to swoon.  And I do collect shiny rocks, mostly in the "thumbnail" and "small cabinet" sizes.  Specimen gems I'm particularly fond of include tourmaline (especially indicolite), microcline feldspar, sunstone (Oregon or India), fire agate, azurite, any type or color of opal, variscite, and more other agate varieties than I can list off the top of my head.  I'm interested in roughs, tumbles, and cabs.

[bobby1]

Maybe Rose Quartz. In the back-lit photos it also looks there are some subsurface grinding marks left over from the cabbing process.
Bob

[Snakeadelic]

I will have to get some natural-light photos.  These are definitely not pink anywhere but under my desk lamp because I'm not a good technical-details photographer and don't know how to make the camera see less yellow.  I've never seen the "turtleback" effect in rose quartz or amethyst, unless they were cut from a larger piece of some kind of chalcedony--it's like the turtlebacks only happen in cryptocrystalline forms, not massive or druzy.  I haven't handled much stone by hand, but I do spend a LOT of time wandering around websites for mines, lapidaries, retailers, shows, collections, and museums to learn about things I don't have the resources to acquire for myself at this point, and I'd be thrilled with any links showing rare or unusual internal features in non-cryptocrystalline quartzes.  :)

As to the relics of grinding, I'm not the one who did the lapidary work and the fella who did has never ever asked me for money because I always tell him to keep what he wants for his jewelry-making business.  I think out of this lot he kept maybe half a dozen stones; when he did opals for me from some Australian white scrap I had been given many years ago he kept just three very small cabs.  Seems more than fair to me!  Is that the kind of thing another lapidary could fix, or is it the kind of thing I need to learn to spot so I can be honest and accurate when attempting to market stone?

[Snakeadelic]

And at long last, I have a natural-light shot of the cabs.  In the attached photo the light is indirect sunlight from a five-foot-wide window behind me and the surface they're on is a white paper towel sitting on a mirror-top table.  I'm having a heck of a time getting the turtleback especially to show up in macro, but when it comes to the tech side of photography I kinda tend to get easily frustrated by the mathematics and physics.  I do see pink tones in several, particularly top and left, but mostly what I see color-wise is white, transparent cream, and assorted lilac-lavender kind of light purples.

The stones I had mentioned removing from this lot for my own use are not in the photo.  All the cabs in the photo are available and regardless of their exact identity would be better off in the hands of people who have a greater chance of finding them the right home.