Freedom on a string

Because a PhD simply isn't enough, I took on a little pet project over the past two months. It's been my way of embracing the idea that when life hands you lemons, you should make lemonade (or perhaps an Earl Grey martini). The story of how I fell into this project is rather convoluted. Here goes:

While traveling in Nice at the start of May, I celebrated Peter's birthday and gave him a rather large collection of cufflinks made from semi-precious stones. He so loved the fossilized dinosaur bone cufflinks I'd given him that he offered to buy me a pendant of similar gemstone-quality dinosaur bone fossil. Upon purchase, his Paypal account failed so I ordered the pendant and he paid me right back.

Out of the blue, about a week later, Peter dumped me via text message and refused to talk/text/call to explain for the next half week, by which time I realized that I no longer needed an explanation, just my stuff back. Belongings successfully retrieved, that chapter of my life was closed. Yet I still awaited the shipment of the pendant ordered during our romantic weekend in the south of France.

Flash forward another week and I discovered how lucky it had been that Peter's Paypal had failed, making me the "buyer" of the pendant. I got an email from the seller, Scott, informing me that the pendant had been smashed in the mail and returned to him without ever making it to Europe. How poetic.
Rather than accept an offer of a similar stone as replacement, I asked to use the credit to upgrade to something fancy. After quick scouring of his website, I knew I'd found the stone for me, and its name was marra mamba.

Marra mamba!

Marra mamba is a rare variant of tiger's eye named after the Marra Mamba Iron Formation where it was discovered. This stone comes exclusively from this iron formation, located at the base of the Hamersley Group which is found in the Pilbara region of northwest West Australia. As of now, all known deposits of marra mamba have been completely mined out. It's a step up from a hunk of dinosaur bone!

As the new stone hadn't been set, the first step was to work with Scott to design my very own customized pendant setting. To begin, I sent Scott an image to use as inspiration: 

This setting by HawkandOwlJewelry, featured on Etsy.com served as inspiration for the marra mamba stone setting that Scott and I designed.

Scott got back to me with a series of suggestions:

Marra mamba stone setting ideas that Scott proposed

And finally, I returned with a design which, much to my delight, Scott approved! "Very pretty" in his words. :)

My final design for the customized setting of my new marra mamba stone

Next step: how to string my pendant. After a few too many lab breaks spent clicking over stones across the spectrum (from sellers across the planet), then an evening's whittling down of choices with Akos as my consultant, I reached the final three: citrine, rhodonite, and green apatite, which I ordered from Canada.

After a long process of elimination, here are the stones I bought to string my marra mamba pendant

Of course, if there's anything I should know going into this project, it's that things never work out perfectly as planned. Scott got back to me with a couple revisions as it came time to place the silver beads into the stone setting and I noticed something suspicious...

My marra mamba personalized stone setting in progress: Scott came back to me to check in on where to place the silver beads, and I noticed that the stone wasn't quite the same colors as advertized.

The marra mambra stone in its setting was much darker than it had appeared in earlier photos, which threw a wrench in the plans for stringing with color-coordinated beads. There was nothing left to do but wait for the shipment and see what the true color would be.

When I swung by my apartment over lunch today, what else had arrived but my fantastically timed freedom pendant, on Independence Day itself! I took a therapeutic afternoon off from writing to get to stringing.

An afternoon of hard work at the library celebrating my and my country's independence.

Upon perusing my bead collection, I found just the thing(s) to complement my earlier bead purchase: a string of tiny dark red fossil beads I'd recently purchased and three strands of colored pearls that I'd bought from a farmer's market in Hawaii ten years ago and had never managed to put to good use. After a bit of play and some head scratching, and finally an afternoon of hard work in the library, I had, at long last, my marra mamba masterpiece.

My marra mamba "freedom" necklace!

Happy Independence Day!