Lorraine Cate (pronounced cah TAY) works only the best quality Kingman and Sleeping Beauty turquoise, fashioning her beads by hand and drilling her own nuggets. She carefully selects her raw materials and miraculously turns them into the instruments of her expression of traditional Santo Domingo beadmaking and stringing. Though she initially learned her craft from her mother, she has spent years working with and assisting her renowned heishi-making uncle Joe Cate (see Joe's work), deceased in February 2007.

These are beautiful hand-drilled nuggets of rich blue Kingman turquoise. Lorraine "cherry picked" these nuggets and then drilled them herself to get the exact orientation on the strand for the look she wanted to create. These are large, smooth nuggets, some angular in shape and graduated in size on the strand. They show good uniformity of color and have been drilled as a set to create the visual impression they lend by using common shapes strung in similar orientation. Stringing is quite an art. Achieving smooth strands that aren't visually lumpy in one or more spots is much harder to do than one might suspect. Betty Rubble would be proud of this strand!