Adding to the rock collection

Each year the local gem and mineral club (the “Rock n Rollers” - how have I not convinced Steve to join this group of old men?) holds their spring show at our local fairgrounds. It is always a fun place to add to our gem collection.

This year I was more attracted to rough mineral specimens than faceted gemstones, though we picked up a few of those, too. The trick is anything we buy has to be quite small, able to fit in my little round plastic display cases. Many of the rough samples can be pretty large.

The new items are a diamond-shaped Imperial topaz; three different garnets: unique purple, a deep pink Umbalist, and a tiny sparkling light green Demantoid; and a cabachon pietersite. New rough stones we purchased are sodalite, azurite, emerald, opal and a tiny little geode.

I really love embedding the rough versions next to their faceted versions in the collection cases. Of course this requires me to move 300 cases down, since everything is stored and labeled by mineral species. I also love collecting as many different colors and varying qualities of each gem as possible. The variety of colors of the same stone is my favorite part of learning about gemstones.

I now have 6 large cases organized by species and one smaller case with organic (eg pearls), synthetic (lab-created or assumed fakes), and non-mineral rocks (volcanic glasses, my new tiny geode). With last weekend’s latest additions, my cases are now officially 100% full. The handy spreadsheet that I keep tells me we now have 387 stones, ranging from free to $1,800 for a total expense of just over $17k. Not too bad for a 35+ year hobby!