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

[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.