AVAILABLE CABOCHONS
(Last updated 7/10/08)
On this page I've illustrated just
a few of the types of cabochons that I have available for wire-wrapping.
Crazy Lace Agate (below left) derives
its name from the fine opaque to translucent bands that swirl
together to create complex and extremely varied patterns. Much
of the material found on the market today has banding that tends
to be various shades of white or gray with creamy browns, blacks,
golds, and occasional pinks or reds, while material from older
collections displays a much wider variety of bright colors. Crazy
lace comes primarily from Chihuahua and other locations in northern
Mexico; the Sierra Santa Lucia mountain range just west of the
village of Benito Juarez is particularly famous for its production
of "Mexican Crazy Lace" (note the wide border on the
pic below; just click on the pic to see an enlargement).
Laguna Agate (below right) comes
from an area just east of Estacion Ojo Laguna (Eye Lake), a tiny
train stop about 150 miles almost due south of El Paso, Texas,
in Chihuahua, Mexico; it is produced by over a dozen claims running
roughly north to south down a 4 mile stretch of the low mountains
located there. Laguna is a nodular, fortification type agate known
for its tight banding and bright colors, and is considered to
be the most beautiful banded agate in the world. The bands may
be clear, white, or any other color; and some specimens
show over 100 individual bands per square inch. Striking (and
sometimes jarring) color combinations in the banding, as well
as subtle color shifts, are common. Fine specimens can be very
expensive, but I got these slices with rounded edges, well-polished,
and with what I think are pleasing colors, at a very reasonable
price.
Most of the "Turritella agate"
(left; really a jasper containing the fossilized and silicified
remains of a snail with a tightly coiled shell in the shape of
an elongated cone) now available in the US comes from an area
in the Green River Formation south of Wamsutter in Sweetwater
County, Wyoming; it displays amber gold or blue to gray shell
outlines on a gray black to dark brown matrix (as in the bottom
two cabs). This material was originally named by rock hounds after
a similar snail agate found in Texas and California that contains
the somewhat longer and skinnier shells of the genus Turritella,
sea snails that originated in the Cretaceous period (and still
wide-spread in today's oceans). But recently paleontologists have
determined that the sedimentary rock in Wyoming was deposited
at the bottom of an ancient freshwater lake some time in
the Eocene epoch (between 53 and 42 million years ago), and that
the fossil shells are really from the freshwater genus Elimia
(still abundant in shallow lakes and streams throughout North
America; the shells of tiny freshwater shrimp are also often visible).
I'm not sure where the top three cabs in my pic are from, but
there is a stone with a white to tan matrix containing true fossil
turritellids (most of which must have its matrix consolidated
with a fixative) that comes from an area near Bordeaux, France;
and there's also a Miocene sandstone packed with turritellids
from an area called the Erminger Turritellenplatten near the German
city of Ulm. Regardless, I think they'd all make great pendants...
Polish Flint (right) comes from
an area on the northern fringes of the Swietokrzyskie (Holy Cross)
Mountains in central Poland, between the towns of Ilza and Ozarów.
A true flint, it was used extensively for knapping throughout
prehistory, and many ancient extraction points and mines are known,
the largest and most famous of which is Krzemionki. The oldest
finds date to the Middle Paleolithic, but its widest distribution
occurred during the Late Neolithic when the Globular Amphora Culture
exported material, mainly in the form of flint axes; its use continued
regionally well into the Bronze Age. A banded flint, grey to brownish
grey in color and often showing dark and white bands (often translucent)
in striking patterns, in modern times it was regarded primarily
as a contaminant during the extraction/making of lime, and not
until very recently did it became popular, first in Europe, then
in the US, for use in jewelry.
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