Another recent piece, this necklace features a 6mm x 8mm undyed natural malachite. Fake malachite is fairly common and can often be spotted by high-contrast banding with sharp borders in the bands. Real malachite has banding that is more subtle, with diffusion at the borders.

This one is set in a silver bezel cup soldered to a hammer-textured silver on copper backplate and measures 24mm x 9mm

I had initially darkened the whole piece with liver of sulfur, but I didn’t care for the result, so I repolished the whole thing back to bright silver. As usual, setting the stone was a pain since the sides were straight, rather than curved, so it required a lot of settling before a nice tight fit was achieved.