"Sonora Sunrise" Chrysocolla & Cuprite 2011

Hey Folks! A little over a year ago I ran a thread with images of work I did out of Sonora Sunrise and I included a picture of the one, four pound chunk of rough I had got in Tucson along with some images of the beads and cabs I cut from that rough. This year I scoured Quartzsite and Tucson for more of this beautiful rough! There wasn't much rough to be had and prices had increased a lot since last year. The one dealer I saw who had any quantity of decent quality rough, maybe a few hundred pounds, was asking 400% more than I had paid for that same quality last year. I ended up getting one decent 6 pound piece of rough from a dealer in Quartzsite and two small, top notch, AAA+ quality pieces that weighed about 2 pounds each, that I got from yet another dealer in Tucson. Less than 10 pounds total and a significant percentage of that gets ground into dust during sawing and shaping!

Sonora Sunrise is a completely natural mixture of chrysocolla (the turquoise colored part) and cuprite (the orange part) and tenorite (the black part) and sometimes brochantite (green specks). They're all copper minerals. It's from Mexico and has only been available in the lapidary world for 4 or 5 years. Very little is available and it is highly doubtful Here's a pic of the rough....

I really, REALLY, LOVE this stuff and wish there was more of it! I've already cut up about half of this stash. From the small piece on the left, which has the wonderful banding of blue-white, blue, black, orange, black, and blue! This is probably some of the BEST material I've ever seen in this and I've already taken steps to keep two of the stones I made out of this for myself (last years piece was as good or better and I did NOT save one for myself!)

and here are some pieces I made out of the "blue white" part of the chrysocolla, along with a natural edged "tornado" shaped cab I made, and the little orange pointed teardrop is made from the other piece of top quality rough (the small piece on the right of the pic of rough).... In this next pic, the top row is made from the piece of the rough on the right as well. I consider this top notch, AAA+ material as well. The bottom row is all made from the large chunk in the middle of the picture. I really love the subtler, more variegated and muted colors and patterns of turquoise and orange found in the larger chunk of rough and it actually takes a little better polish than the more vivid quality colored rough. IF I had never been exposed to the AAA rough, I would still be absolutely ga-ga over the rough from the middle piece of rough! All this material came from the same mine.

The larger chunk has the cuprite only running across the top edge of the rough. You can see in the 3rd and 6th beads in the bottom row that I left the top of the bead with the natural surface of the stone. So on that larger piece there was a significant piece that was mostly chrysocolla with the turquoise blue grey coloring but it has a VERY cool vein of hematite-iron oxide that runs through it and in some places that vein turns to orange cuprite. I'm enjoying just playing with the bisecting pattern of that vein as well! If one can have a love affair with a kind of rock, that's what I'm having with this stone!

FYI, a little education about the nomenclature of this stone and some caveat emptor if you're buying "Sonora Sunrise". The name is a "trade name" for this particular combination of chrysocolla and cuprite from Sonora, Mexico. It has also been co-opted by Chinese dealers for fake gemstones. I just did a search on eBay and there are only 400 items that come up with a search for "sonora sunrise". Out of those 400 items, 288 are "sonora sunrise jasper" pendants or cabs and every SINGLE ONE is a dyed, unnatural color, sold by Hong Kong dealers, and is NOT sonora sunrise at all! Sonora Sunrise is NOT a jasper anyway. Interestingly, if you do an advanced search for "sonora sunrise -jasper" out of the 112 responses one gets, nearly every one IS genuine Sonora Sunrise Chrysocolla and is sold by an American Lapidary. Just doing my bit to educate the beaders and jewelers of the world about real and unique semi-precious gemstones!

Thanks for letting me share my work and my stone geek knowledge!