On Thu, 26 Feb 2009 08:12:59 -0800, in rec.crafts.jewelry Jman
wrote:

The amount and quality of diamonds coming out of the
Kimberlite pipes in Alberta and surrounding Provinces are supposed to
be world class, so you WOULD THINK that they would be EASY to find
here...... Not so.... I think DeBeers likely has enough money
invested in these projects that they get first crack at anything
coming out of the ground.

Whether or not DeBeers has anything to do with it is not the point. No dealer
would sell you a fine gem grade rough cheaply, if, with a bit of effort on the
part of a cutter, the value could be increased many times. If he'll sell you
such rough, it will be at a price proportional to it's potential as a cut stone.
And finding a dealer who'll bother with a retail buyer at all, is your real
problem. These folks deal in quantities, and large amounts of money. You can't
walk into the main factory floor at GM, and buy a car. You have to go through
the dealers who sell the finished goods. Same situation, but made all the more
so because of concerns with security. The high values mean that they're very
choosy about whom they'll do business with at all.

I would have assumed that RAW diamond would
have been far less expensive compared to a carefully 'cut and crafted
stone'.

http://www.khulsey.com/jewelry/rough...d_jewelry.html

Note that for the most part, those pretty little cubes that Todd Reed and others
feature in their work, are NOT cuttable gem grade. That's one reason they can
find them for sale. And indeed, the prices per carat are Much less than the
prices per carat for cut stones. But you still have to go through at least
some semblance of the usual distribution channels. In this case, that would be
finding a gem and mineral dealer who sells such crystals.

By the way, just because the Canadian mines produce lots of high quality rough
doesn't mean you'd be able to find lots of these decorative lower quality goods.
different mines have different characteristics in terms of the type of crystals
they usually find. While I don't know whether these little cubes are not common
in the Canadian mines, I do know that the one's I've bought and seen in the past
have not been Canadian sourced. It's always possible that such rough just isn't
as common in the Canadian mines...

Peter