Dee,
Thank you for the fab pix! You have made an excellent contribution to this forum. I also sent you a private message. You can get it by going to the User cp at the top left of the page.
Satine is going "yum, yum", I'm drooling. I find the pictures inspiring and thoughts keep pouring out. Pardon while I wax on.
Those pearls take me on a journey to the depths of time. This collection really reminds me that most of the natural sea pearls ever found in the entire history of people finding pearls -were probably similarly small and unmatched. Only a tiny, teeny % are large and fewer yet, round or pear shaped!
I saw a similar collection in shapes and sizes, (except the really bubbly ones) but different colors that belonged to my grandfather. He kept them wrapped in squares of red silk, and untied and displayed them to friends and family describing where and when he got each one.
They were all from the Persian Gulf between the 1930s and 1950s where he enjoyed diving himself more than once and actually found a number of pearls himself. He also bought the whole catch for the day on the boats that took him out, so each pearl had special memories of who found it and of a memorable and pleasurable outing.
(He also learn to help sail a Dhow and to speak Arabic. My fav pic of him is holding a model of an Persion Gulf Dhow about 30 inches long and high. He was fascinated by their science- they are rigged differently and sail differently than the sail boats we know in our culture and think they were the pearl boats too.) Now that I have said all this, I hope I did not make a bunch of factual mistakes! I shoulda paid more attention when I got to visit them in 1954!
I learned that the vast, vast majority of natural Bahraini pearls were small and "worthless" and looked very similar to yours from baja. (Worthless only means they can't be used for the round trade- they are not worthless by any means, but worth much less than round and matched pearls)
I do hope they go to a designer who could make jewelry out of them. In another thread I posted to yesterday, before I saw your post-I was coincidently discussing how to use a bunch of tiny, odd shaped Mexican pearls and I thought an illusion necklace might be a great way to go.
My daughter just designed and had made a ring that used 2 similar Mexican pearls set with another little triangle shaped stone. It is not back from the goldsmith yet, but I will post a picture when it comes back. It only uses 2 tiny pearls though and you have a lot of them.
Caitlin
