Gem Capers 2006
The Austin Gem and Mineral Society

By: Paul K. Bordovsky, DDS

Friday is promoted as kid’s education day. This year we had 28 school buses arrive, and we saw a little over 1000 children during the day. Many dealers have $1 “grab bags” filled with a variety of mineral related goodies, mostly tumbled stones. There are various activities for the kids including jewelry making, gem mine, wheel of fortune, and many display cases to peruse. The club also has a “touch table” with many large mineral specimens that the kids are invited to feel and hold.

One popular activity enjoyed by young and old is geode cracking. Murray Fly of Fly’s Minerals has a large selection of coconut geodes from Las Chollas, Mexico, in sizes from 2.5 – 6 inches in diameter. One first selects the desired size, and designates the plane of separation. Then Murray wraps the geode cracker around the nodule and tightens until the geode pops open. There is always a crowd drawn to watch the dramatic “opening”, with much cheering, and big smiles all around.

Next we move on to visit Karen Richards, and Nature’s Treasures. Karen specializes in very large decorator specimens. Here, she is standing next to a quartz crystal weighing more than 1100 pounds. The crystal is mounted on a stainless steel shaft and swivel, and is perfectly balanced, so it spins easily.

She also has large amethyst geodes.

In addition to the large specimens, she caters to the “new age” crowd, although I didn’t see any azeztulite. Next we visit Stretch Young. He has a fabulous selection of tourmalines, and other fine minerals, including an opal pineapple (Extra Lapis (Lithographie) Opal issue on page 32). He also displayed his competition case of garnets.

I next visited with John Rowland. He is a local dealer, and member of AGMS, and is a sphere maker. He has refined the process, and rather the make the many saw cuts, uses his coring machine to make three passes. Then he rough grinds, and polishes. This is a much faster process. Needless to say, many of the club members have John make spheres with their rough, as well as buy his designs. His latest interesting sphere is made from “youngite”.

Nature’s Reflections had a nice assortment of chinese azurites, and prehnite and epidote from Mali.

Scott Singleton from the Houston Gem and Mineral club was manning a demonstration booth. His passion is petrified wood, and he can identify what kind of tree the fossilize specimens came from, based on microscopic examination of the cellular structure. He does much research, has published many articles, and will eventually put these together into a book. He also goes to mineral or fossil clubs and teaches members how to “read” the cellular structure, so they can also identify wood samples.

Finally we go to the best part of the show…….the fluorescent display. The AGMS has a bery active group of “glow hounds”, and every year puts together 4 cases in a dark room. This year there was a case dedicated to minerals from Texas and Mexico, a case full of minerals from Franklin, New Jersey, and two worldwide cases. The Texas case had multi-color specimens from the Karnes Uranium District, Terlingua type calcites from Terlingua, Lampassas, Llano, and from Boquillas, Mexico. There was also angel wing calcite, and danburite from Mexico.

One of the worldwide cases had a large English fluorite from Greenlaws mine, wernerite from Canada, very large specimens of Terlingua calcite, a large ruby from Mysore, India, and a couple of large tugtupites from Greenland.

The show also had the usual assortment of jewelry, beads, and lapidary related items, but I won’t go into that here.