Aventurine
I got a few large pieces of this stuff from the playhouse collection. To my untrained eye, it just looked like some low-grade quartz that happened to be colored green and blue. As with anything hard and looks like a rock, I'll try to cab it.
Further research revealed that Aventurine is the original and natural 'goldstone' Little background: goldstone is a man-made material that mostly comes out of China. It's essentially glass drenched with metallic flakes. It comes in many colors and its popularity among lapidaries fluxuates. I often see it at rock shows, and have even cabbed a little Chinese goldstone.
Anyway, back to my story...
I was reading where Aventurine also had tiny metallic flakes throughout the matrix. I didn't recall seeing any glitter when I was cabbing the Aventurine so I grabbed a cab for a close up. Whoa! Sure enough, it was full of little glittery flakes! I guess I had been so conditioned to the overbearing glitter of the Chinese stuff that I hadn't noticed the finer glitter in my Aventurine.
Then I found a website that was selling Aventurine cabs north of $200 and began to wonder about the scarcity. Turns out it's fairly common and not that hard to come buy. I guess some other cabber took a run out of the DeBeers playbook and tried to create some fabricated demand. You can buy my Aventurine cabs for much cheaper, and I've got a lot of the material so I'll make more.
