Found the Necklace

I found the handmade turquoise bead necklace. The turquoise is not quite as blue, the beads are not quite as huge, it's shorter, but it utilizes the same silver cones and has the same elegant design. It is as close as I will ever come to the magnificent handmade bead necklace I saw in Santa Fe, and I love it. I suspect the turquoise is better quality than that of the earrings I bought from the artist. The beads are pleasingly irregular, each one different. Also, it's strung on wire, much hardier than the Santa Fe traditional carpet string. The price: $25.

The artist is Ebay user gail_ambrocio...and though she is in North Carolina the turquoise is from New Mexico. She makes jewelry for many in the Shawnee and other tribes (including those who sell it as authentic Indian-made), and apparently the head of the Shawnee wears the same necklace. She claims that many of her pieces find their way to Santa Fe with a price tag many hundreds of dollars higher. She charges the range in which she sold to me, but says she is happy the native sellers can make a living with her goods, as her joy is the creation of pieces, not selling them.

Gail's husband blessed the necklace for me before sending it out.

Apparently, outsourcing now affects even authentic native crafts. Ebay offers a great basic education in turquoise, and some good visuals as to what is natural turquoise (3% of stones worldwide), what is treated with a resin to increase hardness (most everything else, as the natural stone is quite chalky), and what is composite turquoise. Some of the world's best turquoise (natural and treated) comes from the Sleeping Beauty mine in New Mexico. The composite (turquoise dust solidified with resin), looks surprisingly natural, not at all plastic-y, like simulated turquoise (plastic). The jeweler I met at Sky City Pueblo, who spent about $5k on authentic native crafts and jewelry, talked about taking a hot needle to his jewlery: a plastic-y smell means the stone is composite.

Many thanks to Gail and her husband.