Variscite

The original wide veined almost mono-chromatic, blue green variscite from this locale has been selected and cut for jewellery by lapidaries for many decades but really it did not excite my imagination. My friend Barry who now owns the lease has more recently been casting his attention wider in his area and has presented to me some very interesting material, blue-green again but in different hues, and with some a beautiful light yellow to mid brown webbing, others within a light to dark grey matrix and vibrant two tone green hues in a snow white quartz matrix. All this material is remarkably interesting, every sawn slab different and a delight to work giving a beautiful finish.

Part 2 Sunrise variscite from Clive’s Find.

During October 2017 Barry from Aradon invited me and our friend Bert to join him in a prospecting trip to a couple of his leases in the Gascoyne area of Western Australia to work up a potential new discovery of Variscite, we named Clive’s Find after a mutual friend who had first prospected up this very finite outcrop.

After working our way through a light but tough overburden we eventually revealed half a dozen veins of multi-hued variscite of varying thicknesses. Once several pieces had been knapped past the weathered sections, they revealed an exciting array of golden yellow through green to light blue colours in a podiform pattern. This pattern when cut at right angles to the view presents that lovely spider webbing (or ‘turtle back’) effect. We later settled on a name for this new material, ‘Sunrise variscite’, since it accurately reflects the colours of sunrise in the desert just as the sun breaks across the horizon in the new day.

I’m pleased to say that this material takes a beautiful high-quality polish and presents a pallet of colours and patterning not seen here before in Western Australia.

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