LittleGemsRockShop.co.uk

Ethics

Although Crystals are not registered as a Fair Trade Product we try to ensure that the Crystals are mined and worked under ethical conditions# and that the workers work in a safe environment and receive a fair wage and that the Natural Environment is not heavily impacted by the mining*.

We also try to lessen our impact as a company on the envioroment by Shipping all  goods by Sea rather than air unless either the items involved are light (ie Jewellery0 or the goods are being shipped from a Country that does not have easily accesable sea ports (ie Congo)or the Shipping methord has been dictated by our customer ie a special order.

* The mines involved in Crystal Mining vary from Hand collected specimens from the surface and from small hand dug pits to larger quarries that are still tiny compared with the massive quarries created by digging for building materials and other industrial uses. We all use these minerals in our every day lives.

# Crystals in Brazil tend to be mined in a organised manner I have only ever seen adults working at all sites I have visited and have visited many of these sites unannounced.

Crystals in India are difficult to give fair trade status as they are often polished and worked on by outworkers in the home environment as fathers pass on their skill to school age children in a informal family environment it is difficult to say with 100% certainty that no young person has ever touched a crystal however I am assured that it is certainly not common practice.

Hi All I have decided to use these means to create an online diary - ¨BLOG¨ of my travels on our Buying Trip to Brazil .

Sunday 16^th February-

Had to wake up at 3am to get ready to leave the house by 3.45am Kathy dropped me at the airport to start the usual mammoth trip. Had to de-ice the car first as the temperature was -5deg c at Norwich Airport ; however just on point of takeoff we had to wait for the ground crew to deice the plane. The plane took 1 hour to de-ice so the plane took off for Amsterdam 1 hour late meaning no time to dordle at the next airport in fact it was final boarding by the time I got to the gate of my next flight. The next flight was an 11.5 hour trip to São Paulo taking us 11,000km South over the Tropic of Cancer the Equator and the Tropic of Capricorn.

On landing in São Paulo (a huge city and a concrete jungle of an airport) I had to wait for a little while longer for my next flight to Porto Alegre which takes us 1500km further. Whilst waiting the Night was Punctuated by a fierce thunderstorm this delays our Flight by a Hour and as all the Regional Airport anncments are being made in Portuguese I asked the assistance of chap and asked in my pigeon Portuguese if he speaks English ¨"a little" he says as he pours information out in perfect English, he lives near Porto Alegre and is returning home to his family after 6 months studying language in London a Lady I sat near on the previous plane had also been in Europe for the last three months study in language all find England terribly expensive.

Monday 16^th February-

On Board the next Plane We head South Again to Porto Alegre in the state of Rio Grande Do Sol

This State has European feel mixed with Latin America with many German and Italian descendants the Germans traveled here to take advantage of perfect Grape growing conditions and also in the mid 18^th Century they started to search the globe for Agates after they exortsted their own supply in Ider Obertien having found plentiful supplies in Rio Grande do Sol many headed here to mine extract Agates before Exporting them all the way to German to be Worked a massive undertaking if you were to do it now but 150 years ago im not sure how they even contemplated it!!

We arrive at the Airport (the Airport is far plusher than any Airport I have visited before floors and Walls of gleaming Marble Granite and Glass).After waiting for the cases I get a taxi into town to sleep the night & have a few hours before continuing the journey later in the day.

Over 26hours and nearly 13´000km later I get into bed zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Had Breakfast after a lay in stayed in a plush hotel the sort I could never afford in any other part of the world had a couple of hours to spare before I was picked up by my driver so did shopping before Lunch and then traveled for 4 miles into the heavily wooded mountains & up into the dry flat plateau of "pampas" "a area of rolling hill after hill of dry grass land with Pampas grass growing wild among the other grasses. Interspersed between the ranches are Soya bean fields and Sugarcane plots.  This area of Brazil has always been its last frontier and has extremely sparely populated until the mid 19th century and until this time had just a few military posts and other wise was just occupied by the gauchos who at the time were semi nomadic. Arrived at 8pm that night to a fine dinner of locally caught fish from the lakes from where I stay with rice eggs salad and Beef. Then off to bed before I get on with what I meant to be doing here tomorrow... buying Crystals !!

PS Due to lack of sleep my appalling spelling lack of time to proof read and no UK spell check this end this text will be full of typos ( Hopefully Lauren will Edit it for me )

Tuesday 17^th February-

Awoke at 7am felling shattered outside the morning was hot already 20-25deg at a guess
On walking down the hill to get breakfast a bird similar to the swallow was gathering on the telephone lines 
For Breakfast there was a choice of bread cheese ham etc
(their cheeses tend to be mild from edam strength to very mild). They had
Fruits like melon bananas papaya etc and cakes and biscuits. To drink there
is coffee that im avoiding or teas like bollo that comes from Chile a little like calamine tea. 

I traveled into town and I looked around for an hour or so and started
picking Minerals I have listed a few below
Golden Healer Points 2-4" and a few clusters. Mini Tangerine Quartz
Clusters 1-2". Red Iron stained Smoky Quartz points5-7",Fractured Natural
Citrine,Rougth non porous Crysprase, Rough Rhodachrosite,large Quartz
clusters 6-18",Small-Medium Snow Quartz clusters,Golden Healer
Quartz,Medium sized Fluorite clusters, large Amethyst Clusters 6-24",Large
Amethyst points2.5-4",Good Quality Amethyst Flowers 1-6",Smoky Quartz
Points 4-6",Mini Quartz Clusters 1-1.5", mixed tourmalines 1-3",Fushite
3-18",very dark Lepidolite 2-4", Grey Quartz clusters not smoky think its
lithium cloudyish almost grey blue no brown at all 3-5" 

We broke in the middle of the day for lunch for lunch at a local roadside restaurant
I had Potato salad, Rice, Fried Cheese, grated beetroot, grated carot,potatos and
pumpkins cooked in a sweet syrup palmetto and pickled onions for sweet I
had pears pouched in red wine and fruit With a meringue top. Very Nice!

What’s more in the evening I had a fish from the lake on the park cold shredded beetroot
and carrot a whole big steak fried eggs
rice and French fries followed by a vanilla slice type of cake. This is getting more like a food Blog!!

Been really busy at work today ended the day feeling shattered.

Wednesday 18^th February-

I’ve ended up writing this up late in the evening its lovely and clear here tonight so Im hoping  I will see the lunar eclipse its due at around 3am your time but a more convenient midnight for me (not a problem usually for me but I really need to catch up on my sleep this week!!) Maybe the Eclipse will appear upside down as Orion always appears on the slant in the night sky here You can see the southern cross clearly tonight was annoyed that the moon was so viable on this visit as it means if could not see the magaletic cloud hopefully it will dim off enough tonight to see it and the really bright bit of milky way!
Called on one dealer today who specializes in Uruguay Amethyst really pleased as got a good deal as he was low on stock & only had a grade in that is to expensive most of our customers wouldn’t want to pay the extra money for the grade beyond good grade however he didn’t want to see the sale go away so I brought 90kg of polished edge cut based amethyst and 70kg of dark Uruguayan Druze. managed to get tumbled Lepidolite at a reasonable price from another dealer and a large smoky Elestial cathedral quartz from Jacare mine also a very dark smoky point of a good size encrusted in black tourmaline or at least it looked like black tourmaline but the light was poor where i was shown it. I also happened apon a batch of new material that I brought that they call “blued quartz” it is infact a tumbled brown matrix (a jasper agate mix) with pockets of blue quartz in it. Among the other purchases of the day were a small quantity of small but dark lapis 1-2" I snapped this up as large pieces are practically impossible to break down it seems often that the hammer will break before the lapis!!
It seems there is another British dealer in town; I have met him once many years ago when we first started in the trade hopefully I will bump into him tomorrow.

Thursday 19^th February-

The eclipse was indeed spectacular last night I will try to upload the photos I took of it on my return.
Continued my travels today a busy day with much to tell
Visited a old friend Josie, he introduced me to some interesting material he had Silver Edge Lazor Quartz that throws a rainbow on its edge as you look through it it is water clear only one in every 200 points has this character that is mined from this one location hence it is not cheap and I only managed to get a few pieces but very nice indeed I also brought lazor points and delicate lazor quartz clusters both from Dimantina Nice Lepidolite mica. Agate t lights & bookends later in the day & some nice large Amethyst Druze I returned to Josie he kindly offered to take me to his farm 10km from town to look for Agates on his land. After a beer on his veranda we set about hunting in cutting that had been made in his field for a track. It only took seconds there were masse of fragments of Agates in a distinct band only 12inches under the soil there were agate and masses of Chalcedony roses it was as easy as looking for acorns under a oak tree soon are hands were overflowing and we returned to his farm for carrier bags we continued the search in a niebouring tobacco field the soil was coved in large stones of 6-12" however after a short time I spotted a glossy football shaped stone that looked vaguely familiar it was a intact agate nodule the size of a grapefruit! after a short while more fragments of agates turned up of 2-3" many with distinct banding where they had been fractured as the sun set low we put the larger geodes in a rice sack we found in the field raising our heads to the setting sun we saw a flock of birds settling in the tree above us by the light of the golden sun you could see that they were in fact a flock of green parrots some seven of them in fact after we had marveled at the them we headed back to his farmhouse with our finds we sorted them out on the the veanda and watched the moon rise over the lake. We then left to Josie’s town house where we spent some time with his children & family & had Pizza before I returned to my hotel.

We Sell meteorites from many different falls around the world these are mostly dated at  around 4-5 billion years old

These are grouped into the following categories

Stony meteorites - these as the name implies have a stone like texture often with a outer crust which can be black or pale and can exhibit cracking and signs of exposure to high temperatures these can be broken down in to the two sub categories


   Chondrites 86% estimated at 4.5 billion years old these are made up of small particles there origins are thought to be from the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars & Jupiter

  Achondites 8% Looks very much like surface igneous rocks mostly from the crusts of large asteroids as they cooled such as 4 vesta and even in very very rare cases crust from the moon mars & mercury


Nickel Iron meteorites 5% very dense and heavy for their size and attract a magnet easily unlike other similar minerals

Stony Iron Meteorite 1%
pallasites- like the nickel iron meteorite but these are very rare and contain crystals of peridot- these meteorites are thought to have come from the deep mantle of a planet like body that has been ripped apart earlier in our Solar systems history or possibly a asteroid

The last group that falls outside meteorites is tektites most of the tektites that are collected are associated with craters 7 meteorite falls such as Darwin glass & moldavite. Tektites are generally agreed to be the molten result of fusion created when a meteorite hits the earth at high velocity

Warehouse up and running

Molavite galore

Chinese Stock Just In!

Amazonite 
Black Obsidian, New Jade 
Goldstone blue & Gold, Mahogany obsidian,  Fluorite, White howlite
Lapis Stabilized. Labradorite 
Pietersite
Dalmatian Jasper 

Marcasite, Aragonite

Indian shipments

Amethyst Mining

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