A new spinel from the Morogoro area of Tanzania, cut in a round brilliant design. This one is a mauve color with a slight purple cast. Has more life than the picture shows. I bought this rough in Tanzania, and got a good price on it, so it's priced to sell.

Tags: Spinel

Help Break the Chain of Cruelty
. . . and get a fantastic doing it

As many of you know who have purchased stones from me there is a return address sticker creating awareness to the Puppy Mill problem. I moved to PA last year, and found out that it's the Puppy Mill Capital of the US, and maybe the world! I have volunteered with United Against Puppy Mills to help bring a stop to this cruel "business".

There are 1667 puppy mills in Lancaster Co. PA alone, some with over 200 dogs as full time breading prisoners. These dogs spend their entire life in rabbet hutch type cages breeding puppies that are then sold to pet stores on online. The conditions are horrendous that these dogs live in, the dogs are often sick, injured and diseased with no medical attention. When they can no longer breed they are often either starved to death or drown, then thrown in the corn field for fertilizer.

You can help

• Don't buy a dog from a pet stone (99% come from Puppy Mills)
• Don't buy dog's Online
• Do buy a rescue dog
• Go to the website www.unitedagainstpuppymills.org and tell everyone you know
• Google Puppy Mills - you will be shocked at what you see!

There has been a great demand for the Spinel from Mahenge Morogoro, and I have a rather long list of people wanting one. So here your chance to own one, and help out the dogs. The stone will be offered to everyone on the list, and anyone else who visits the website. It's going to be like a sim-silent auction. The stone will be on sale until Friday October 30th at 6:00 pm EST. Each night until then I'll post the high bid here. You will be able to bid again up until Friday night.
The starting bid will be $679 - proceeds will be donated to United Against Puppy Mills to help stop this terrible cruelty.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE CURRENT HIGH BID

Here's the details of the stone:

• 1.43 ct.
• 6.42 mm. cushon cut
• Color: 10, Clarity: 9, Brilliance: 5, Total Quality Rating: 9.7

The United Against Puppy Mill bracelet is included with the stone.

Tags: Spinel

I’ve been busy doing some garnets, but slipped in this spinel over the weekend. This one is from the Mahenge area in Morogoro Tanzania. A very hot pink color, that gets a bit more red in incandescent light, and more pink in florescent.
1.04 cts.




New Grading System

For all stones posted after March 16, 2009 this grading system will be used. Stones previously posted will still have the 1-5 grade system.

Color is the most important and complex to grade. Color is made up of three components, hue, saturation and tone. Color will be graded on a scale of 1 to 10 taking these three factors into consideration.

Clarity is graded on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being loop clean under a 10X loop.
10 = Loop Clean
8 = Eye Clean
6 = Slightly Included
4 = Moderately Included
2 = Heavily Included
Values between are used when the stone is either a bit cleaner or less clean. It's very rare to find any stone score a 10 for clarity. 7 and higher makes for a very nice stone.

Brilliance - will be a combination of Cut, Sparkle, light return, Proportion and Crystal.
Graded on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the best.

Total Quality Rating - Is the combined score of these 3 with a possible best score of 10

1-5: Low end commercial
6-7: Better quality commercial
8-8.5: Fine quality
8.5-9.5: Very fine quality
9.5-10: What the trade calls "gem"

Tags: Spinel

Here’s a new design I made the other day. I had this shape in mind, but wanted something a bit different. The stone is tipped a bit in the picture, and that’s why the culet looks off center, but it’s not. The stone is a spinel from Morogoro Tanzania, and weighs 1.72 cts.

Tags: Spinel

Just finished up a new spinel. This is another stone from Tajikistan that is 5.07 cts. Rather large for these spinels. Here's an article by Richard Hughes and Vincent Pardieu dealing with ruby and these spinels from Tajikistan.




I haven't been slacking the past week, I was actually working on some stones for one of them members of the GemBusters forum. Here they are..
Try to guess what they are!

Tags: Spinel