Quartz, var. smoky
Crystal Park, Beaverhead Co., Montana
Cat. no. RD-001
Specimen Label Maker
A rock without its locality is just a pretty stone. Type in what you know — the mineral, where you picked it up, the day you did — and the card fills in as you go, ready to print at drawer size and sit in the tray beside the specimen.
The card
One card at 3 × 2 in, on a letter page.
What belongs on the card
Locality is the one field you cannot get back later. Write it the way a catalog does, small to large: the pit, road cut, or claim first, then the county, then the state. "Graves Mountain, Lincoln Co., Georgia" will still mean something in forty years. "Georgia" will not. If you need the wording for a place you have been, every entry in the Fee-Dig Finder carries its town and state.
The date and the collector's name look like padding until the day you are holding two quartzes that look alike and can only tell them apart by the trip they came from. A catalog number ties the card to whatever notebook or spreadsheet you keep.
Why does the dot change color?
It follows the mineral family, the same way the cards elsewhere on the site do: pyrite gold for gold, silver, and pyrite; malachite green for copper minerals, turquoise, and jade; agate rust for agates, jaspers, garnets, and petrified wood; amethyst violet for everything else. Type the mineral and the dot follows it.
The cards print small, or without their border
In the print dialog set the scale to 100%. "Fit to page" shrinks the sheet and then 3 × 2 inches is no longer 3 × 2 inches. If the border and the color dot come out missing, turn on "Background graphics" in Chrome, or "Print backgrounds" in Firefox and Safari. Card stock beats paper, and a paper trimmer beats scissors.