Last weekend I had a great opportunity to visit European team captains' summit.

I hope most of my readers realise that amber is not really "made" as such. It has been around for hundreds of millions of years and is a product of a long process.
Amber is fossilized tree resin (not sap). Hundreds of millions of years ago huge coniferous forests covered big parts of what is today Baltic sea and its environs. Resin from these trees (in our region its Pinus succinifera and similar trees) seeped down sometimes trapping insects or other organic matter (this way forming so called inclusions) and then solidified. Geological changes caused parts of the forest to be buried under the ground or later even water and the process began.

Small raw amber nuggets

Ok, I'm cheating a bit :) it was new 2 months ago.
A great designer Lisssa has been super fast and made me anew logo in a week! And not just any week -- Christmas and New Year week. She is brilliant!
I have seen a new logo on my friends shop and asked her for some pointers. She gave me Lisssa's contact and off we went.
After several emails where I described what I want and some tweaking of her ideas she came up with this:

My shop logo

I love kimekomi technique -- it is so versatile and fun to work with.
I played with Christmas decorations in December and gave a lot of great gifts -- my family and friends loved them! Three of them are now in Canada and making their owner happy.

At the moment I am playing with Easter decorations -- decorating Easter eggs.
I have made a few dragon eggs for Game of Thrones fans. These are quite big at 12cmx7.5cm

For a long long time the only kind of fossilized resin that was allowed to be called amber was Baltic amber.
Then along came the second world war and Germans lost their access to the Baltic amber mines. Enterprising companies started looking for amber elswhere and found it, lots of it in fact in Dominican Republic. The original company became so successful that it soon got kicked out of Dominica and forbidden to export raw amber.

Blue/green amber (Wikimedia commons)

This fossilized resin was accepted into amber family around 1960.
Dominican amber comes from the resin of Hymenea protera trees as opposed to Pinus succinifera of Baltic amber. It is guessed that a lot of the resin was produced during forest fires caused by lightnings.

Dominican amber is found in many colors - the traditional yellow, orange and brown, but also transparent, without color.
Pink variety is rear, but the reason for this blog post is the rarest blue or sometimes green amber. Only some 100 - 150 kg of blue amber are mined in a year. Miners tell that blue amber is most commonly found in the amber mines in the mountain ranges around Santiago, Dominican Republic, Palo Quemado mine.

Amber is a naturally occurring fossilization of Pinus succinifera resin. The age of Baltic amber is estimated at 40-60 millions years.
It is used for jewelry and medical/beauty purposes.
The majority of the world's amber is found in the Baltic Sea region (hence the

Inclusion in Baltic Amber (picture from Wikimedia)

name -- Baltic amber). Other kinds of amber, added to the classification quite recently, only from 1950s when amber was found in Dominican Republic, make up only 2% of the total yearly production of amber.
Geologists estimate, that there is enough amber in currently known deposits to last us another 1000 years, but some of these deposits are in unattractive for mining locations -- protected zones etc, so the demand of amber drives people to "play" with what is available.
Because Baltic amber is naturally occurring fossilisation, quite often there are impurities, different colours, etc in one piece and people quite often want uniformity. Certain methods where developed already in 19th century to provide that.

As most people know, amber is a fossilized resin from coniferous trees. It has many amazing magical and healing properties.
Copal is "immature" amber. It's softer and easier to damage, but has most of the same qualities as amber, just to a lesser degree.
 
How to test your jewelry to see whether it is really made of amber:

Light test

True Amber will fluoresce blue under a black light. This is probably the easiest way to tell, with no chance of harm to a piece.

Static test

Another simple and safe test. But probably a lot harder to do if it's a piece set in metal. Amber is warm to the touch and when rubbed, it will become electro-statically charged and will attract lint/dust particles. And to a lesser degree, Copal will do the same.