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Eco Friendly & Fair Trade Jewelry

Archive for the ‘stones’ category

Crazy lace agate, also known as Mexican agate, is an attractive, white, opaque stone, patterned like a beautiful, multicolored paisley cloth. It is a cryptocrystalline quartz, found in Mexico.

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Nebular Jasper was discovered in the last ten years and is a combination of minerals never found before. Named after the green swirling patterns against the dramatic black background of the stone, it reminds one of nebulae - those cosmic formations of galaxies being born!

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Porcelain Jasper is mined in the mountains outside of

Hermisillo, Mexico. This fine jasper is characterized by its exotic patterns in pink, purple, and cream colors.

Our Eco & Fair Trade Promise
We are committed to ensuring our products come from artisans that source their raw materials through Eco Friendly means. We abide by Fair Trade standards and ensure that we only work with ethical vendors who pay fair wages and protect workers’ rights. This collection features designs made entirely of ethically-sourced materials - stones and shells that are plentiful in the earth.

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Mother of Pearl is the common name for iridescent nacre, a blend of minerals that are secreted by oysters and other mollusks and deposited inside their shells, coating and protecting their bodies from parasites and foreign objects. Unique and gentle!

Our Eco & Fair Trade Promise
We are committed to ensuring our products come from artisans that source their raw materials through Eco Friendly means. We abide by Fair Trade standards and ensure that we only work with ethical vendors who pay fair wages and protect workers’ rights. This collection features designs made entirely of ethically-sourced materials - stones and shells that are plentiful in the earth.

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Labradorite is truely a fascinatingly beautiful mineral. It’s a mineral whose charm is not fully noticed and may be overlooked if not viewed from the proper position. Generally a dull, dark looking mineral with no special virtue until the colorful shiller is observed glowing on the surface. Labradorite can produce a colorful play of light across cleavage planes and in sliced sections called labradorescence. The usually intense colors range from the typical blues and violets through greens, yellows and oranges. Some rare specimens display all these colors simultaneously.

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Golden Sheen Obsidian is a lightweight, shiny black gemstone created when a volcanic flow is cooled very quickly, into what Geologists call volcanic glass. Obsidian is formed when volcanic lava comes into contact with water, cooling the lava quickly. This produces a glassy texture sometimes containing small bubbles of air that are aligned along layers during the cooling process. These bubbles can produce interesting effects such as the golden sheen you see here, known as Sheen Obsidian.

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Tiger Moon Sea Shell common to

Eastern Asia. Found offshore to 30 meters.

Our Eco & Fair Trade Promise
We are committed to ensuring our products come from artisans that source their raw materials through Eco Friendly means. We abide by Fair Trade standards and ensure that we only work with ethical vendors who pay fair wages and protect workers’ rights. This collection features designs made entirely of ethically-sourced materials - stones and shells that are plentiful in the earth.

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Brecciated Jasper: Brecciated jasper has a gorgeous crazy paving effect. The word breccia simply means “rock composed of sharp-angled fragments embedded in a fine-grained matrix.”

Our Eco & Fair Trade Promise
We are committed to ensuring our products come from artisans that source their raw materials through Eco Friendly means. We abide by Fair Trade standards and ensure that we only work with ethical vendors who pay fair wages and protect workers’ rights. This collection features designs made entirely of ethically-sourced materials - stones and shells that are plentiful in the earth.

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Jewelry Spotlight: Abalone

March 13th, 2008

Abalone shells are rounded or oval shellfish with a large dome towards one end. The shell has a row of respiratory pores. The muscular foot has strong suction power permitting the abalone to clamp tightly to rocky surfaces. The innermost layer of the shell is composed of nacre or mother-of-pearl, which in many species is highly iridescent, giving rise to a range of strong and changeable colors which make them attractive to humans as a decorative object.

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Jewelry Spotlight: Mookaite

March 13th, 2008

Mookaite is found only in

Australia and is actually a fossiliferous sedimentary rock. Microscopic examination shows this rock consists of the remains of tiny organisms known as radiolaria that have an unusual skeletal structure of opaline silica. When the seas retreated, these sediments were cemented into solid rock by silica carried in groundwater. Mookaite has been found in many very bright colors, reds, purples, tan, snow white, ivory white, pinks and many other shades. Sometimes but not often it will have black dendrites and in the hands of a careful lapidary the cabochons can be stunning especially if you get very lucky and run into a nice dendrite tree.

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Ocean Jasper is named for the circular movement captured within the stone: ocean bubbles are frozen in time, adding a reminder of the vastness and the richness of the ocean itself. This stone has only been available since the year 2000.

Our Eco & Fair Trade Promise
We are committed to ensuring our products come from artisans that source their raw materials through Eco Friendly means. We abide by Fair Trade standards and ensure that we only work with ethical vendors who pay fair wages and protect workers’ rights. This collection features designs made entirely of ethically-sourced materials - stones and shells that are plentiful in the earth.

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The Shiva shell, also known as Shiva Eye or Pacific Cat’s Eye, is the protective covering at the operculum (opening) of the Turban snail shell. Toward the end of the snail’s life, the covering detaches and sinks to the seabed.

 

Depending on the sea snail’s diet, the shell color varies from beige to deep green, while the background remains pearly white. On one side of the Shiva shell is a spiral, which is unique from shell to shell.

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