Everybody must get stoned

[pasithea]

I spent the afternoon goofing off. Decided to try my hand at stone-cutting with a few pieces I found at the beach plus I did some really bad practice scrimshaw on a couple of bits of shell that I wasn't overly fond of. Shell is much much harder to work than bone or horn but man am I out of practice. Those lines are terrible. Oh well. Next one I do will be better.

Pendants by ~dv-girl on deviantART

The top two are bits of shell. The first one is a broken piece from a greenish tinged bit of scallop shell. Not sure what sort of snail the second is. Tried a bit of scrimshaw on them both, though I'm very rusty and they were just practice pieces. Inked the scallop with black and the snail with white.

On the bottom row, I believe the two green stones are malachite. I cut them both from the same larger stone. It's fairly soft and sands easily. It's also magnetic. The color/pattern was better in the direction I cut the smaller piece but sadly it also put me cutting across a fracture and meant I couldn't get any large pieces from it.

The red stone is, I think red poppy jasper. Whatever it is, it's a very hard stone, only barely more malleable than flint. This piece was just a pebble that I ground down a little.

Next I'll have to teach myself silver smithing so that I can make mounts for the stones.

Comments

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

I had no idea that malachite was magnetic.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Yeah. That's the thing that's puzzling me. I don't know what this stone is. It really doesn't look much like malachite but it's about the same hardness. It magnetic, which I've never heard of jade/jadeite/nephrite as being magnetic plus it's a little softer than jade is supposed to be.

I'm really at a loss.

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

The stones are so smooth, is that a result of being near the surf?

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

No. That's the result of being cut and polished by me.

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

You work fast. How did you do that? I didn't even know that one could cut and polish a stone of most any sort in a day or two.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Sure. People with the proper tools can probably do this stuff a lot faster than I can.

I washed the stone and looked for fractures and what angle I thought would bring out the best features. Then I cut it using the cut-off wheel on a dremmel tool. Did some basic shaping with the dremmel, then hand sanded the rest with successively fine layers of sand paper and finished it to a shine by rubbing on a leather work glove. Same as for polishing anything really (though most people use a chamois cloth for that last step. I just didn't happen to have one available so I improvised)


I painted and polished my motorcycle in less than a day. Not hard, just requires some patience.

[silverbrand.livejournal.com]

I used to do a little bit of silverwork, mixture of soldering sheets and some lost wax casting. I still have some of my stuff, but I don't have access to the centrifuge or kiln anymore....and don't have the money to get them.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

I was figuring that next time I saw a children's bike in the dumpster, I'd pull it out, remove the rubber tire and a few spokes, then add a box for placing castings, a counter balance on the far side, and a splatter guard around the wheel. Remove the front wheel and fork. Turn it upside down with a 'stand'that fits in the seat post. Should be able to crank it fast enough to make a decent centrifuge for small pieces and be small enough to fit where I want to store it.

For melting silver, I was thinking I'd just use an O/A torch that I have.


Though after a night of rest, I decided that for this first piece, I'm going to mount it in coconut and do some brass wire inlays around it.

[silverbrand.livejournal.com]

I should make a ghetto centrifuge too. Also, if you get yourself some descending gears (or whatever the technical term is for it) you could easily rig that so you don't have to crank it fast to make it spin very fast.