Dennis Anderson raised the issue of using Feldspar as the Grand Master material in his post of March 25th. I would tend to agree that this choice of material would make it harder to show the stone off later if you are looking for sparkle but I have a question: does the stone have to be clear? Could we facet an opaque stone? Judges would still be able to discern meetpoints and polish and if we had some opaque feldspar material you would still have the challenge of faceting the softer material, you just wouldn’t get the sparkle from within the gem. Not sure I would even want to submit an opaque stone exactly but I have been contemplating a dark color like a tanzanite CZ for this year’s Master’s class.