THIS LISTING IS ONLY FOR PENDANT! NO CHAIN OR CORD INCLUDED!
Teardrop 1" x 7/8"
The setting on this piece is as considered as the stone it holds. A triangular Manassa turquoise cabochon vivid sky blue threaded with warm olive and gold matrix sits centered in a clean bezel within a hand-cut scalloped silver surround that frames the composition like a medallion, like something official and permanent. To the right of the stone, four graduated sterling silver balls descend in a clean vertical line a detail that is both architectural and entirely handmade, the kind of mark that tells you exactly whose hands made this. The stone measures 1” x ⅞” compact and precise, with color that punches well above its size.
Manassa turquoise carries a warmth that the Arizona and Nevada blues do not a blue-green that shifts toward olive and sage depending on the light, reflecting the high mountain Colorado geology of its origin rather than the low desert Southwest. This stone shows that quality perfectly bright at the top, deepening through teal and olive toward the base, the matrix threading through it in quiet gold veins. Set in oxidized .925 sterling silver with a scalloped surround and graduated ball detail, this pendant rewards the close look every time. Sold without a cord or chain it belongs on whatever you already love.
Details:
Stone: Manassa Turquoise · Origin: Colorado · Matrix: Turquoise & Tans · Metal: Custom Sterling Silver · Pendant Setting: 18mm x 32mm Teardrop · One of a Kind with Makers Mark
Made in Taos by a Taosena.
Some Jewelry is made. Some is found. At Fire & Stone, it's both.
King's Manassa Turquoise Pendant
Manassa turquoise comes from Conejos County in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado high mountain country at over 7,000 feet elevation, where ancient copper deposits in a Precambrian volcanic formation have yielded some of the most distinctive turquoise in the American West. The mine has been worked since the 1890s and takes its name from the small town of Manassa nearby the same valley where the land is flat and wide and the Sangre de Cristo mountains rise to the east like a wall against the sky.
What makes Manassa turquoise immediately recognizable is its color a warm, earthy blue-green that sits apart from the sky blues of Arizona and Nevada and the teal range of New Mexico mines. Manassa runs toward olive, sage, and golden green, often with rich brown and reddish matrix that reflects the iron content of the host rock. It is turquoise that carries the color of the high mountain West not the desert Southwest but the altitude country, the cold-morning, thin-air country where the light is different and the ground runs to different minerals.
The King family has owned and operated the Manassa mine for generations one of the few remaining turquoise operations in the American West that is still in the hands of the family that worked it from the beginning. That continuity matters. The Kings know this deposit the way you can only know land you have spent a lifetime on where the best material runs, how the color changes with depth, which pockets yield the finest stones. Turquoise that comes from the King family operation comes with a provenance that cannot be replicated or approximated. It is Manassa turquoise from the people who own the mountain.
Natural King’s Manassa is increasingly rare on the open market. The family controls production carefully, and what reaches the hands of artisan jewelers outside the region is a small and diminishing fraction of what the mine yields. This stone came the long way out of a Colorado mountain, through the hands of the King family, and into silver in Taos by a Taoseña who knows what she is working with.
