Austrian Finds HUGE Buried Treaure

What do you do if you are digging in your garden and instead of worms, you end up finding a big cache of buried gold, silver, and gemstone jewelry? Apparently, if you are one Austrian man, you throw the stuff into an old box, stick it in your basement, and forget about it for 4 years! Then I guess finally you see a bit of sparkle through the sluffing dirt and at long last you decide to show the stuff to the authorities who tell you the items are probably 650 years old and worth quite a bit of money!

But even after all that, the man was apparently not overly excited about the whole thing! Supposedly, there are about 200 items in the stash, but very few photos have been published. Hopefully, more will be coming soon. The items are indeed interesting looking and not of the style currently popular.

Silver and Rhinestone Necklace

One of my latest little projects has been to redo a necklace that my mother found at a garage sale for a dollar. The original necklace had sterling silver round beads and long curved tube shaped beads strung onto a leather cord. We always like it when she can find sterling items for next to nothing, but neither of us cared much for how the necklace looked on us. In addition, the clasp was unreliable and would sometimes let loose after only a slight jostling.

We both felt the necklace needed a center piece but after trying multiple options that we already had on hand, we still could not find anything that really wowed us. Luckily, about a week later, my mother found an old moth eaten white dress in a thrift store for a few dollars. The dress was a mess but on the neckline was stitched an interesting rhinestone assemblage which my mother felt would look nice on the silver bead necklace. So she bought the dress and tore out the rhinestones and stitched them onto the necklace as a center piece. At this stage, I thought to take a photo which you can see at the top right. (Click on photo for larger view.)

We liked the rhinestones as a center piece but felt that overall, the necklace now lacked cohesiveness, so I invested a few more dollars to buy four rhinestone and sterling Swarovski rondelles to add in between the other beads in order to bring some of the rhinestone flash into other areas of the necklace.

Then there was the problem of the leather and unstable clasp. The solution was to restring. At first, we had hoped to use a sterling silver chain in place of the leather, several of which my mother had on hand from other lucky garage sale finds. And we had some additional silver beads on hand that we could cannibalize from another ugly silver bead necklace my mother had once picked up. However, the holes in the existing silver beads were very large and designed for a large thick type of cord. The end result was that on a small thin chain, the silver beads would flop erratically and not hang straight. A similar thing happened when I tried Soft Flex beading wire.

For a while, I was at a loss as to how to have the necklace strung as I desired while still having the big hole beads hang properly. But finally I came on the idea of using a big thick heavy gauge silver wire and stringing the beads onto that instead. Happily, I already had some on hand that I had bought previously with vague plans to maybe use it in a soldering project someday. The thick wire managed to hold the beads steady. At each end of the necklace, I bent the heavy gauge wire around itself to form two loops. In one loop, I put a large lobster claw clasp and the other loop would be the place the clasp would attach. The second photo shows the finished product.

The end result is a ridiculously glam mix of art deco sparkle meets native American rustic. But we like it.

Malaysian Silver Art (actually from Sumatra apparently..)

Seek and ye shall find! Every weekend, my mother likes to make the garage sale circuit. Many times, she finds little of interest but sometimes she makes some extraordinary finds. One day several weeks ago, she was rummaging at the bottom of an old box filled with heavy plastic dolls when she spied silvery colored lattice work. Carefully digging further, she realized that covered by these ugly worthless dolls were solid sterling silver lattice house replicas. She began to pull out whimsical little silver houses, one after the other, many with weird pointy roofs, for a total of nine pieces including a palm tree and and an ox pulling a cart. The wheels even turn on the cart! Trying to maintain her composure, my mother asked the woman having the garage sale, as casually as she could, "How much for the little houses?"

"Three bucks!" the woman said!

My mother was so surprised that she quickly gave the woman three bills, bundled up the silver houses, and drove off immediately before anyone else would notice what she had! There in the top photo, you can see my hand holding one of the medium sized houses, which is as big as my hand. Unfortunately, when I took the photo, I accidentally left off the top little point of the roof. A week later, the same woman had another garage sale and my mother returned to ask where the little houses had come from, but the lady did not remember. And there was nothing similar or valuable anywhere else in that sale. And you can bet my Mother looked hard!

However, some clues were to be had about the houses' origins because on the back of the largest house was written in silver, "KT Gedang Perak 925." 925 universally means silver, so that was the easiest part. The rest took some serious work on Google, but I finally deciphered it. 'Perak' means 'silver' in Malaysian. KT stands for 'Kuala Terenggano,' a large city in Malaysia. And 'Gedang' is likely a different spelling for 'Gadang' as in 'Rumah Gadang.'

What, you say you don't know what a 'Rumah Gadang' is? Well that's good because neither did I! Luckily, Wikipedia knows and has a fascinating article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumah_Gadang . In case I ever had any doubt of the authenticity of these cute little houses, once I saw this photo below of the real thing (taken from the Wiki article), I realized these little silver houses were not constructed from whimsy at all but in fact were careful replicas of the real thing, even down to the little points on the rooftops. Wow, these places make my home like a shack!

I guess it's not surprising, then, with all this effort into the decor, that these are the traditional homes of a Sumatran clan called the Minangkabau whose cultural structure is matrilineal. That means the women own and run the property in this clan and these houses are passed from mother to daughter. Take note all you men! ;-P But the religious and political affairs are typically left to the men, so I guess they aren't completely left out. However, what is even more interesting is that these people have kept their traditional matrilineal culture, even though their culture is also strongly Islamic.

Although the clan is from Sumatra, many have settled in Malaysia and one can only surmise there is or was probably one of these houses in Kuala Terenggano somewhere, which is why 'KT' was written on the back of the silver replicas. All this from a garage sale, I swear you just can't make this stuff up!

(And in case anyone feels the urge to mention there are only eight structures in the photo instead of nine, I'll let you know now that the 9th structure was another ox and cart but the cart got squished by the heavy ugly dolls that were on top of it and my Mother is trying to carefully repair it, so it did not make it into the photo.)

[Updated 4/2014  Well looks like my sleuthing was not as accurate as one would like, I was informed by a kind observer of the following: These are not from Kuala Terengganu in Malaysia but from Kota Gadang in Sumatra. KT is short for Koto. Pieces like this were made for sale to visitors way back - they may be from the 1920s or so.]

Eldon's Secret Purple Agate

Eldon, one of the newer members of our rock club, recently moved into town. Eldon has extensive experience with rockhounding, silversmithing, casting, stone cutting, etc and always finds time to help the rest of us with any sticky lapidary problems.

Recently, sitting around the table chatting at the rock shop, he told me the story of how one time long ago when he was working up in Northern Arizona, he ran into a man who had found a secret cache of beautiful purple agates up in the mountains. Eldon, of course, was immediately interested in the location of this agate, but the man would not immediately tell him. He wanted to keep it a secret, but he did give Eldon a very general vague description of the approximate location, such that Eldon would know where to start looking.

However, the description was so vague and the area was so vast that Eldon could not find it after many tries. Time after time, he went out searching, and each time, he came back to the man and told him where he had gone looking. Each time, as Eldon related his tale, the man would laugh gently when Eldon reached the point in his description where he had turned the wrong way. So each time, Eldon was given a new clue as to the location. And so he would try again.

Two years later, Eldon finally found his purple agate. The collecting area was not large, but many nodules of banded purple agate were to be found and each rock had to be packed out many miles through rough terrain before it reached civilization.

Some of the rocks had large spot patterns similar to ocean jasper. Others had many well delineated bands of color. Some just had gentle shadings of purple. All were beautiful and to this day, as far as we know, only Eldon and that one other man know of this secret agate location. Neither has ever told a single soul.

Here are some of the slabs and artworks that Eldon has created from his secret purple agate nodules. The butterfly body is cast in silver. The bracelet was a gift to his wife. These are not for sale, but they sure are nice to look at!