I love color, especially thrilling combinations like this particular piece -- turquoise and some form of red. Usually you'll see turquoise with coral, a combination associated with American Indian jewelry. To give this collar a more classic direction, I used faceted garnet the color of fine rubies held the strands together with an antique glass floral clasp of the same color. The result: a striking three-strand collar to wear with everything from black velvet or a summer white dress to jeans and a work shirt.
Price: $600.00
INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT TURQUOISE:
"If cold December gave you birth, The month of snow and ice and mirth, Place on your hand a turquoise blue, Success will bless whate'er you do."
So goes the children's rhyme about the traditional December birthstone. Highly-prized since ancient times, turquoise, mined extensively in the American Southwest, China and Tibet, is used extensively in Native American, oriental and occidental jewelry. Few stones have such rich traditions and such an interesting history. Considered by geologists to be a secondary mineral -- a product of weathering which fills crevices, veins, and cracks of rocks near the surface of the earth -- is is found near veins of copper, usually in arid lands (the Southwestern deserts, particularly) where the action of rainwater breaks up and dissolves the porous rock and redeposits it in sedimentary rock. The light aqua to bright Tiffany blue of the gemstone is because it contains less than 10 percent of its neighbor, copper, but enough to give it the gorgeous blue color. Turquoise with more iron content has more yellow and green in it and considered less desirable.
Turquoise is a very friable stone with a Moh hardness number of 5-to-6. It fractures very easily and is subject to outside forces like natural body oils (which can change its color) and water. It gets its name from the French and means "turkey stone," as it was originally thought to be found in Turkey when the gem was introduced to Europe in the Middle Ages. It has been mined for many centuries in Iran, Egypt, and the Middle East. In Iran (Persia) it is the national stone. Very fine Persian turquoise contains no copper matrixing and is of extraordinary color, prized as much as gold and rubies, if not more.
Jewelry of remarkable workmanship, considered to be the oldest in the world, have been found in 6,000-year-0ld tombs. Among the peoples of both the ancient and modern worlds, it has always been considered a good luck charm: For instance, it was the talisman stone of the Egyptian goddess Hathor who was known as the "Mistress of Turquoise;" the Tibetans never refer to turquoise as a stone, but instead as a divine manifestation and Native Americans believed that the celestial blue of this stone was stolen from the heavens by storms, and that if one went to the end of the rainbow and searched the damp earth, he would find a turquoise.
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