We have just finished adding 363 new Palm Stones encompassing 20 mineral varieties to the website. This represents the single largest addition of items in Kathi’s Krystals history.
That is the good news. The not so good news is that it took us almost four months to accomplish the task since we got back from Tucson in early February.
I have mentioned previously my “interesting” stay in the hospital last year. What I have not mentioned before is that Kathi suffers from a severe case of Fibromyalgia.
I am responsible for sorting and preparing stones to add to the store, and Kathi handles maintenance of the store including adding all new listings to the site. Because of her condition, on most days she is not able to work on the site, and on the few days when she is able to attend to its requirements, she is able to work for only a short amount of time.
The result of all of this is that we both get things done much more slowly than we did a couple of years ago and we apologize for not getting the goodies to you in a more timely fashion. We also have had no choice but to suspend our ebay sales since the beginning of 2014.
All that said, we remain committed to providing one of the very finest options for acquiring minerals on The Internet. We believe that our breadth and depth of items offered, our obsession with quality of product, our attention to detail, our presentation format, the extras that we provide with each purchase and our unsurpassed customer service result in a one-of-a-kind buying experience for the members of our client family.
Just today I received an email from a new client asking if the stones that she saw in the pictures were the same stones that she would be receiving in her order. We find it sad that a stone lover would even have to ask such a question, but such is the nature of Internet mineral shopping.
Our working principal from day one has been that our clients must have 100% confidence when ordering from us, and that has been the foundation of Kathi’s Krystals’ success for almost eight years now.
We appreciate your patronage and hope to have you with us for many years to come.
Now, on to the new offerings in no particular order:
For those not familiar with the story of Ocean Jasper, it was the rage of the mineral world in the mid- to late 90s. The mine was on the coast of Madagascar, and could be reached only at low tide… hence Ocean Jasper.
Shortly thereafter the deposit was mined out, and only those dealers who had old stock material were able to provide this amazing orbicular Jasper to the market. For years now, there has been only one dealer processing the best of the original rough stone, and it is this dealer from whom we have acquired our amazing OJ tumbled and Palm Stones.
Again this year in Tucson the dealer had incredible Ocean Jasper available, and we purchased every single nice Palm Stone on which we could get our hands. The sad part of the visit was that we were told that they had finally run through all of their rough old stock supply, and this would be our last opportunity to acquire the amazing stones produced by their 70 employees in Madagascar.
We came home with normal sized palm stones as well as extra-large ones, and we have listed the two sizes separately. Many of the larger one have crystal pockets, and one even has a crystal vug that goes all of the way through the stone.
Thank you to Elka and Ida for providing these wonders for us and our friends.
We had been out of stock of this amazing and expensive crystal for a few years, and were happy to find some really nice specimens in Tucson.
We have listed 21 of them, including a couple of yellow and a couple of blue ones, along with the more common lavender color stones. Even better, a few of the crystals have gorgeous rainbow colors hiding inside.
This year was the first time that we have seen these stones available. We put up 32 of them and they are each amazing in their own way.
Rhyolite forms in the flow from volcanoes, and often shows gorgeous colors and patterns. These stones are no exception and represent one of our best bang-for-the-buck offerings.
From Madagascar, these stones comprised of microcrystalline Quartz are beautiful and relatively inexpensive.
Many people are familiar with Blue Chalcedony, but not aware that Chalcedony forms in many colors. The material is very hard and, at least to me, almost looks like some kind of fossil material.
Aside from the amazing Malachite Worry Stones that we have, we haven’t really ever seen any Malachite that was cut into a classic Palm Stone Shape.
That said, we came home with a large bag of gorgeous Malachite specimens that certainly can be considered to be in the Palm Stone category. They have beautiful color and patterns, and are comfortable to hold in the hand.
We added 16 of these new ones to the site, and they are definitely worth a peek. A few of the specimens even show some chatoyance (like Tiger Eye) which is a highly sought after quality in this wonderful material from The Congo.
This is a first for us. These stones are from Madagascar and are just full of shimmer.
A member of the Feldspar family, the stones range from a brownish to pinkish color, and even though the pieces look gorgeous in the photos, the stones are even prettier in person. One has to move the stone around under a light source in order to appreciate its true beauty.
We were running low on these hard to find stones and usually buy them whenever we can find them.
We came home with two different kinds this year.
The smaller ones are higher quality stones with very nice color and very few inclusions.
The larger ones are not as vibrant in color and show more of the Graphite often seen in Emerald marketed in this category, but have very nice shape and feel.
In the end, they are all Emerald stones, and we are thrilled to be able to have them.
First time ever!
We were really excited to find these in Tucson. They are large soap-shaped stones with beautiful color and a nice translucent quality. There are only 11 so you might want to pick one of these early.
This is the first time that we have had these as well.
We bought a bag of smaller stones and many of the pieces did not have fire in them.
There were 16, however, that have red to red/orange fire and they are listed on the site. As you can see in the photos the stones are not perfectly clean, but they are really special and very unusual.
These are probably the coolest stones that came home with us.
One of our favorite dealers from India had a small bin of these amazing specimens. I picked out the 10 best ones that he had, and they are all listed in the store. They are so unusual and pretty that I think we will be taking one down to put in our display case.
The stones are white Quartz with inclusions of sparkling lighter green Tourmaline, as well as inclusions that at first sight look to be black, but are very dark green Tourmaline.
Some of the stones have small natural imperfections, but nothing that takes away from the beauty of these wonders.
The ones listed are all that we have, so you might want to put these at the top of your shopping list.
We loaded up with lots of outstanding specimens of this incredible material from Madagascar.
Many folks have never seen Black Moonstone and it is something to behold. All of the 19 new Palms listed have great shimmer or sparkle, and many of them have incredible rainbow colors.
Everything considered, these hand-picked beauties are hard to beat in terms of their light show, and, as with the Peach Moonstones, even nicer in person than in the photos.
Always one of our most popular stones, we added eight new ones to the store. As can easily be seen in the photos, Polished Schorl is almost never completely free of natural striations or other small vugs, but we offer only the cleanest ones that we can find.
We were lucky to find some wonderful new Aragonite stones from Madagascar. They are substantial pieces with beautiful translucence, and many of them have wonderful patterns. We have 17 of these really nice stones in the store.
When we found these beautiful large soap-shaped stones in Tucson we were both surprised and thrilled.
We have only 8 of them to put on the site, and I doubt that they will last very long. If you are a Jade lover these are a must have.
This is the first time that we have been able to offer this mineral for sale. It comes from Russia and the stone consists almost entirely of Carbon.
Again from Russia, this incredible mineral seems to get more expensive everyday. We feel fortunate whenever we can find any nice stones that we can afford to offer for reasonable prices. Some of the stones are not as Palmy as we would like, but we have to be a little flexible when acquiring Charoite.
There are 15 new ones that came home with us from Tucson, and we are happy to have them again on the website.
We were almost out of these wonderful stones, but now have 20 new specimens in the store.
We acquired these from one of the most reputable dealers in the wholesale mineral trade, and we guarantee them to be genuine Turquoise.
Arfvedsonite is one of our most favorite stones, and the website was completely out of stock.
What often happens is that a client will buy one stone and then come back for more once he or she has the privilege to see the mineral up close and personal.
These palm stones are hard to obtain, and we have listed just 7 new ones in the store. They are worth a real hard look.
Always beautiful, we have added 13 nice new offerings to the list, including one that has rainbow colors.
This material is often used for making jewelry, and this was the first time that we have ever found Palm Stones of Red Coral.
The material is very light weight, exhibits very pretty patterns, and glows a beautiful purple under UV light.
That’s covers all of the new Palm Stone listings.
We will now be working on approximately 30 varieties of Tumbled Stones that we gobbled up in Arizona. As always, if you have any questions, comments or requests, please feel free to contact us by email or phone.
Thanks again to our client family for your wonderful support of our efforts.