The big baroque story:
The main purpose of our trip to Zhuji was the procurement of new freshadama strands for an upcoming television show in the next couple of weeks. I cannot say what show it will be, but it is one that you all know well. Yeah Zeide, that one - finally. This took a lot of time as we needed several thousand strands.
Well, we finished up a day early (and I say "we" because I brought Mia from my office) and I decided to start searching for large baroques. The farmers are currently harvesting pearls so it was actually quite difficult. They were not yet separated. We spent most of the day pawing through fresh harvests to find suitable pearls. We were literally lucky to find one that worked per thousand on the separator (large from small). We ended up with only about a kilo of pearls in the 12mm range (up to 14mm). The pieces that I put together this morning came from that bag of pearls. Unfortunately this means we will only be able to make 5 or 6 decently matched strands.
We were only able to find one company in Zhuji that had already separated a large lot of bigger-size baroques. But they did not separate for quality, so we would have had to select the pearls one by one - not a big deal, except... the company was Tears of Angel. For those of you familiar with the big players out there, Tears of Angel is definitely in the upper echelons. The problem is, their prices are out in fantasy land. For example, they wanted 250RMB per pearl for selection of the large, free form white. We had already selected about 100 pieces just to ensure that it would be worthwhile to continue before we sat down to negotiate. Although the pearls were beautiful with intense orient, 250 is crazy - that is about $30 per pearl, or about $900 for a finished strand of 12-14mm baroques. For the colored pearls (like those in the photo) they wanted about 3x market price for selection.
Needless to say, after a bit of haggling we left their office in disgust - that was my first visit to Tears of Angel, and most certainly my last. The whole company name is:
Zhejiang Tears of Angel Jewellery Co. Ltd. (stay away unless you are ready to overpay!)
Because it was our last day in Zhuji I settled on the selected lot, left a couple of dozen pieces with a friend of mine there, and carried the rest home. My friend promised to comb through all her new material as it comes in to collect the real baroque gems.
So, I am going to be putting together a few teaser strands but will not likely put them up for sale. I am just learning to match them and playing with different color combinations for now.
The picture is of the two of us separating the baroques at Tears of Angel. I am working on the colors, Mia is separating the whites.