Mammoth Crescent Necklace

This project started out with an idea to gift a jewelry piece as a birthday present. Remembering an Alaskan ivory carver who had shared some photos of fossilized mammoth ivory on a message board I frequent, I headed to the local ivory dealer he had mentioned to pick some up with the idea of doing a carving and some scrimshaw. I had never done any sort of jewelry before, and had never worked with ivory, so this idea intrigued me. I wound up picking out the piece pictured here for a reasonable price, and after getting home, started figuring out how to work with this stuff. Shown here is the piece I sawed off for this project, alongside the raw remnants of the chunk.