Friday, April 10, 2015

Treasures

...or "What an insomniac with a cell phone, credit card and an ebay app can do after midnight"


One night (or morning, depending on how you look at it) recently, having exhausted my blog feed on feedly, emails waiting to be read and facebook (not too many new updates after midnight), I began searching for "vintage turquoise" on auctions ending soon on ebay.  These beauties were reasonably priced and ending by early morning, so I bid on all of them, thinking I would get one.  Lucky me, I won all 4 auctions!  (Anybody else ever do that?  Anybody?)

The  pretty silver belt buckle has a walnut and turquoise inlay, and vaguely reminds me of Smokey and the Bandit for some reason.  

I also won 2 sweet little rings that will need to be resized--1 for me and 1 for my daughter-and a great turquoise cuff.

While in the midst of my nocturnal ebay foray, I began to realize that vintage turquoise and silver has its own language and history and that I knew absolutely nothing about it except I knew what I thought was pretty and was in my price range.  There were details of silver purity, which mines the turquoise came from, names of artists stamped on pieces, Mexican vs. Native American made and all kinds of other details.  It was quite the rabbit hole to go down at that time in the morning.  

After wining all 4 auctions, I felt like I might want to know a little bit more about what I was bidding on next time.  I found these resources  and will be doing some research before the next time the siren song of night-time auctions comes calling.



and  



What treasures do you look for on ebay and etsy?  If you're interested in turquoise, here are a couple pieces for sale right now on ebay that I thought were just lovely.


and this higher-end green turquoise necklace.

Hope you have a fabulous day.  Happy Treasure Hunting!

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