If you've read any
of my Healer's Apprentice books (Fairy Gold, To Heal a Broken Planet, or
the current WIP Into the Unknown) you
know that my main character, Teeka, wears a necklace with a "magic
stone" that her mother got from the gillys, the semi-mythical telepathic
and telekinetic natives of her planet. The stone isn't really magic, but enhances
Teeka's own psychic abilities.
When I first
started the books, I based my description of the stone on one in a ring I used
to own: a dark amber, with a flash of green fire inside if the light hit it
just so. I bought the ring in a thrift shop, and thought, because of its size,
that the stone was glass. But I've never found any glass that behaves that way.
I later suspected that it was actually a rather large (and perhaps valuable) specimen
of andalusite. It's a moot point, as the ring was stolen many years ago, and I
also learned that andalusite only shows the color shift if it's faceted. I
wanted a natural stone, stream-polished but uncut.
Friends had suggested
it might be a good thing to offer copies of Teeka's necklace along with the
books. They needed to be inexpensive enough to be marketable, even if I didn't
make any profit, but only used them as a bonus with books. After searching for
suitable stones, I concluded that it might be necessary to manufacture a fake
stone of cast resin, and enlisted the aid of a jewelry-making friend, but what
with one thing and another it didn't seem to be happening.
My jewelry-making
friend had also suggested labradorite as a possible substitute, but I wasn't
impressed with the small beads she showed me. Then I ran across larger pieces
on Etsy, and purchased a few. They aren't necessarily amber (although some show
glints of that color) but all the samples I've bought do produce the
"green flash" which is what I wanted. I still have to determine an
optimum size, plus the cost of mounting the stone in a simple wire wrapping,
such as my gillys (not much into making things) might use simply as a way to
carry the stones. The stones are utilized as training devices for their
children.
