Thank you!

We asked for suggestions in our last newsletter, and you responded big time!  Twenty-eight customers took the time to email us everything from congratulations to product suggestions to newsletter ideas.  Thank you for all of those emails, and please keep the ideas and suggestions coming!

Heidi wrote, “I really wish you offered a bigger variety of cabochons!”  Thanks for the feedback Heidi.  We carry over 300 different cabochon products and have over 50,000 cabs in stock and ready to ship, starting at just $0.20 per stone.  Clearly you want more, and we’ll work to make that happen.  We’ll have some new Spiny Oyster cabs up on our website next week, and we’ll try hard to continue to expand our selection.
 

Cabochons – The Original Jewels

 
The question of how long people have been decorating themselves with jewelry is one that cannot be answered definitively.  The earliest items that can be clearly identified as jewelry date back to somewhere between 80,000 and 110,000 years ago – snail shells, pierced to provide a place to hang them as beads, and painted or dyed with natural pigments.  The earliest cave paintings that have been discovered only date to around 35,000 years ago, so jewelry was likely one of the earliest ways homo sapiens expressed themselves visually!  Early stone jewelry from the fifth millennium BC has been discovered in a variety of locations throughout Africa and Asia.  Bronze jewelry from Thailand dates to around 2000 BC, and elegant gold jewelry from the same time period has been discovered in the area of Mesopotamia.  This is also the time when we start to see stones set or inlaid in metal.

The word cabochon derives from the Middle French word caboche, which means head.  It’s a word that is slowly becoming more and more disused as people shorten it to simply “cab.”  An example of an early cabochon is this green jasper heart scarab of King Sobekemsaf II, circa 1590 BC.

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Cabochons are in many ways the original jewels.  Some of the Egyptian Pharaohs wore gold crowns with cabs and inlaid stones.  King Tutankhamun’s crown is a beautiful example (click to view), circa 1333 BC.  The Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Empire shown here with a wide variety of beautiful cabs dates to the 10th century AD.

Click Image to Enlarge

Using Cabs

Although Cabs can be mounted with prongs like faceted gems, they’re typically mounted with a metal bezel surrounding them.  Bezel can be a frustrating material to learn to use because it’s very thin metal and it’s typically soldered to a much larger and heavier piece of metal.  Learning how much heat to apply with the torch takes a great deal of practice.  An alternative to creating your own bezel mountings is to use manufactured bezel cups. 

Bezel Cups

We carry over 50 styles of bezel cups, including many with rings attached to them.
 

Stone Pendants

New to our website, eighteen different cab pendants.  They’re mounted, come with bails, and they’re only $3 each!  Mix and match ten of them to get a 10% quantity discount.

Suggestions?

Is there a product you think we need to carry?  Content you want to see in this newsletter?  We always welcome customer suggestions!  Click reply to this email and let us know!

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Acknowledgements

Scarab and crown pictures included for educational purposes.  Scarab picture from The British Musuem, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.  Holy Roman Empire Crown picture by Wikimedia user Bede735c, used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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