I have been on a kick lately to dig into my old singleton collecting material and cut some fresh bouquets. It's been a while since the ranch shut down and split into three pieces, sold off to neighboring ranches. One of the things I did after each trip was to lay the material out on the driveway and scrub them all and then look at each with a loupe to see what was a guaranteed bouquet. I would make 3 piles, Guaranteed Bouquet, Plume (black and White) and everything else. After sorting I labeled to 2 special bags and loaded all the everything else material back in the bucket and would put the 2 bags on top of the material and put the bucket with the rest of my buckets. I would occasionally hold some pieces out to cut. A couple years ago I went thru many of the buckets and pulled the bags out and consolidated them into a couple high grade buckets. But I had been to the ranch so many times I have many buckets still unopened. A friend started sending pictures of his bouquets he has been finding by tumbling the rough nodules that have no clues and there are LOTs! He sent a picture that made my heart sink thinking I didn't have as good. I started tumbling my unknowns also but wasn't finding as many then I remembered how methodical I was on getting home separating So I went on a mission in my garage looking and found I have (4) 6 gallon buckets of verified Bouquet plus (3) 18 quart totes of the verified bouquet and several 8 quart totes. Some of my best I had never cut. One of the trips yielded some of the most 1 percent stones I've ever collected on the ranch. There was one slab I had cut that was from a special spot near one of the ranch house on the property and I had found 3 pieces all together of the material. I had cut the biggest of the 3 and got I think 7 or 8 slabs. One of those slabs made its's way into San Antonio Magazine. Well I had pulled some of the material from one of the buckets the other day and picked random from a couple bags. I pulled out about 10 smaller nodules and 3 larger to glue up. The first of the larger were 2 of Black Plume bubbly plates with a band of gold plumes running thru the center of the plates parallel with the base. and was most excited about cutting these. The 3rd had some visible plumes on the bottom and had a knob on the side that looked like it had lighter shade plumes. I cut the black and gold and they were nice but not amazing. When I cut the 3 larger piece I made the first cut to remove the rind it struck me, this was one of the other 2 pieces I hadn't cut from the material that produced the magazine slab. I was so excited waiting for each slice to drop I simply took pictures with my cell under the Titans work lights so not optimum but wanted to share. The 4th slab is probably sitting down on the drop tray as we speak and I'll check that tomorrow. These are blurry in parts due to the cell. BUT MAN I LOVE BOUQUET! I'll repost a couple more pics of slabs I cut from that trip and have never posted to my website in a follow up post. Here are the 3 slabs (1 pic each side x 3 =6).. Ill try and find the magazine slab pic and post it also it is the last pic with the reddish plumes in it
