2013 Pilgrimage to the Gem and Mineral Show

It's hard for me to believe another year has gone by and it was time for the annual Gem and Mineral Show in our area.Here's the link to last years show 2012 gem & mineral show,   
and the link to 2011 show (I didn't start to blog until after the 2010 show so I don't have any other posts about the Gem and Mineral shows.) 
  Every year I love to go and look forward to seeing all these wonderful specimens and this year was no different. I got to see some stuff I hadn't seen before and enjoyed getting the pictures of them.  Now if I just had more money to spend.  Here's some of the images I left with wishing I could have taken them home with me.  But then again where would I have put them??? I guess they're better of where they are.

This is what it looked like when you first come in and are looking to the left. 

 But of course when you look straight ahead you got to see this booth with all this lovely jewlery. 

 But I come more for the minerals and unique things that you don't see every day.  Like this specimen of quartz/ amethyst. It was huge but the price was also huge so I just settled for the picture.  I must apologize for the lack of a good scale on this piece - the best thing to go by was the yellow price tag which  was about 1 inch and as you can see the price on it too. If I had to give it a size I would say it was about the size of a regulation soccer ball.

 This next one was my all time favorite thing to see.   This slab with more than one complete crinoid. The price was also huge and so once again I had to settle for a picture.  Plus the person selling it didn't know much about it and if I got something like that I would want to know more than it came from Morocco.  Again I must apologize for not having a scale.  It was on a stand and there were signs saying do not touch so I couldn't put anything on it for scale.

Cirnoids with calyx attached

Here was another pretty amazing cirnoid that was out of my price range too.

 This pyrititized circular piece which I think is a sand dollar was also pretty spectacular with its gold hue against that dark almost black shale/limestone. This was about 4-5 inches in diameter. The yellow dot is 3/4ths of an inch.

 This piece of beryl/ aquamarine was pretty amazing too. Biggest piece of beryl I've ever recalled seeing even in a museum.   I didn't see a price on it but I could only imagine how much they were asking since they kept it in a locked case and since it was in a case there was no way to put a scale next to it. As I recalled at first I thought this was petrified wood since it was so big then I looked at it closer and realized what it was.  Scale wise I would say it was bigger than a basketball.

I thought there was something good for scale in this picture but there wasn't. The green dot is 3/4ths of an inch. This fish was about2 feet long.  A good size by anybodies standard. Around here anything over 12 inches is a keeper and this was bigger than 12 inches for sure - yes a definite keeper.   It was fascinating to see it all together like that and so well preserved..

This trilobite was something else too.  I'm not too sure what this one is but if I had to venture a guess I would say it was related to "Odontochile".  Again the dot is about 3/4 inch long.

I wasn't too sure what this was.  A stingray of some sort maybe? But still pretty well preserved and fun to see. Look also at the fish that were on the slab with it.  

One of the things I like about the gem and  mineral show is that they like to do demonstrations and here the kids were learning how to polish stones.  They were given a piece of red jasper held in place by was on a stick  and were taught how to hold it as the sander was moving.  Then the demonstrator would switch out  the different grades of sandpaper getting finer and finer for a more polished look.

Another view of the show. 

One of my kids favorite thing to do was to get a geode and to have it cracked open.  I just loved seeing the wonder in their eyes when they get to see whats inside.  And here it is being cracked open. 

I should have taken a picture of the open geode but I forgot to and this one wasn't for me.
But here's the geode I had gotten a couple of years ago.

clear quartz geode

   I guess now I have a reason to go to the show again next year to get another geode. I do love going to the show and look for excuses to go more than once.

As usual I can't leave the show empty handed and this is the specimen I couldn't resist and felt it needed a good home.  At least with this one I did get a scale in it on the bottom - its about 3 1/2 inches. 

Sulfur from El Disierto, Bolivia

This year I mostly just got more beads and things to make jewelry with.  When I do make pieces I'll post some of them later.  But this is it for this post.
Once again I must apologize for the lack of scales in some of these images.