elementary
fully equipped rock polisher
Member since February 2006
Posts: 1,077
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Post by elementary on Feb 20, 2012 0:34:47 GMT -5
Wound up going to a local estate sale and picked up a random box of sealed medicine bottles.  I started going through it and came across a couple jars of 'eh' tumbled stones, another with some interesting tumbled obsidian (rainbow, sheen) that can't match Mel's in quality, a small batch of peridot:  another marked 'emerald'  two marked amazonite  and then I picked up this jar filled with a thick amber liquid and held it up...hello  and another and another and another     another couple with turquoise  and amethyst pieces  These are going to be great to give my kids - at least the inexpensive finds. My question - what value does the opal fragments have - and I also see at least four different types. Is anybody able to i.d. the origins of any of this stuff? Value? I'd like to give pieces to my students, but if the value is too high, then I should look into saving them for some other use. Don't know what that would be, but right now, I don't know what I have. Thanks, Lowell |
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nuevomundo
starting to spend too much on rocks
Member since March 2010
Posts: 222
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Post by nuevomundo on Feb 20, 2012 1:45:39 GMT -5
They are pretty, but very small chips and so generally worth very little. Pennies apiece, maybe. Good cabbable rough can be had at $2-5. This stuff is worth less, and how many pieces in a gram?
Looks like it would be good for inlay, or making some sort of reconstituted material, but other than that I'd say they'd make great gifts for students!
On the grey matrix stuff and the larger bits, if they are not crazed and have good fire, may be worth something, but if they are crazed or with little to no fire the value may be quite low. Always hard to tell from pics, especially with fire opals. You can always pull out the nicest, most cab-worthy pieces and give the rest to your students!
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Post by helens on Feb 20, 2012 2:04:06 GMT -5
Depending on how old it is, the first bottle can either be Welo Ethiopian, or Australian chips. I say it depends because Welo has only been around (the white type vs the chocolate), for the last 3 years or so, that's when it was discovered. But now that I look at the jars again, I'd say Aussie, because it's mostly opaque. Welo Ethiopian is usually hydrophane, which means it will go clear in water (but still show fire, probably more fire). The reason it's stored in water is because the Aussie tends to lose all that color once dried... that's more a novelty bottle than anything you can cab to make a gem out of. It happens that the littlest ones with fire are the size I need. I am hoarding teeny opals to do glass experiments with, and I will probably fry them all, so I need lots:). To verify prices, you can go to Ebay, they don't sell chips, the bigger the opal the more it's worth, but it will give you an idea of pricing to verify what Nuevo says about value. If you are interested, I would be interested in trading for those 2 small bottles with the littlest chips if you aren't going to use them. Third opal pix looks like Queensland boulder opal (also Australia). They have a nice blue fire, but tons of rock and matrix to pick through. The actual opals are teeny also. Good ones have a pattern, or very large visible opals... yours are very small. 4th opal pix, the white solid ones are Cooper Pedy opals from Australia, you can see them here: facetroughgemstones.com/gem-store/product_info.php/products_id/921 5th opal pix are Mexican Fire opals (the ones in the red rock matrix). Which is sort of a misname, because they rarely have fire, the name refers to the orange to reddish colors. I am certain of the above locations btw, Opals happen to be one of my obsessions. They are extremely temperature sensitive, and no one's figured out how to encase them in glass (gilson opals yes, but they are made from glass, they are synthetic and not real). Hope that helps:). * edited to correct wording |
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Post by FrogAndBearCreations on Feb 20, 2012 7:43:48 GMT -5
all that small chip opal and gemstone is great for doing inlay!
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Sabre52
Cave Dweller 
Me and my gal, Rosie
Member since August 2005
Posts: 20,504
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Post by Sabre52 on Feb 21, 2012 0:49:23 GMT -5
Lowell: Strangely enough, there used to be a site for digging little gray nodules with fire opal out by Death Valley NW of Tecopa Hot Springs Those fragments you have in the bottle in pic #7 appear to be from that site. They occur as little weird shaped gray nodules in a silicified ash/tuff stuff and when you whack them open, they have little opal lenses inside, mostly pretty small but with lots of fire....Mel
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Post by johnjsgems on Feb 21, 2012 8:08:11 GMT -5
Packed in oil is the way opals were bottled in the 60's and 70's. I inherited a lot of oily opals from that era.
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