As of 4/21/11 Silver is up to $46.6 an ounce! A Word About Silver Silver just got way more expensive! about two years ago, in 2008, silver prices remained steady at around $9 per ounce and rose only slightly throughout 2009 into the mid-teens. Right now at the end of 2010 silver is up to $30 an ounce! The rise in cost affects everything - the artists ability to buy silver stock to make their jewelry and resell it. Artists generally purchase materials on an as-needed basis so with silver prices going up they have to charge much more for their pieces. It also affects the jewelry manufacturers who hire the silversmiths to work in their shops. It's like a snowball effect throughout the Native American Jewelry industry. Silver is a valuable and finite resource. It's used in jewelry, photography, silverware, coinage as well as having many industrial uses from batteries to electronics and you know how many electronics are out there! It's also used in medical applications as well solar energy and water purification. So the demand is high all around. But considering how valuable Silver really is - it's still one of the best buys there is in jewelry. And, despite sharply rising silver prices I have not raised the prices of the items I already had listed. Below is an interesting article copied from the internet: *Did you know…? • Unlike gold, silver is consumable (actually used up) in most industrial uses • In 1942, the U.S. Government had over 3 billion ounces of silver. Those stores ran out completely several years ago. • Over 90% of all the silver mined in the past 5,000 years has been used up and is gone forever. • Right now, there is more than five times as much gold in the known world supply compared to the world supply of silver. • Current world silver demand is around 900 million ounces per year, but the average worldwide production of silver is only 480 million ounces. In other words, we are only producing just over half the silver we use every year. • Gold has been steadily increasing, but silver has yet to follow. The gold/silver price ratio (currently 51:1) has skewed far from its historical norm (20:1). • World demand is growing, but the U.S. Geological Survey says there is only about 14 to 25 years worth of silver left in the ground. *Taken from BigNews.Biz article titled “NEWSFLASH: Silver Prices Skyrocket Past Gold”