I had a deep post planned for today all about, you know, being nice to one another and stuff but unfortunately, life had other plans.
Today has been a very quiet day because last night Cardinal Chunder visited me again. Not only did he visit me but possessed me to wreak horrible havoc on my surroundings. I pebble-dashed the bathroom rug, myself, my feet and the other bathroom rug, the lavatory… oh god it was awful. But I managed to clear it all up before I went to bed and the rugs have both been through the wash today. So that’s nice. Gulp.
Yeh, sorry that’s enough of that. But like I said, it meant today was a bit of a wipe out. I wanted to write that post, indeed I typed up some, but then by about 3 o’clock I was nodding off so I decided to repair to the sun lounger round the corner and have a little zizz.
It was quite a big sleep as it turned out but I do feel a lot better. You know how it is, sometimes it’s best to just give in to nature. However, it means I am faced with the challenge of writing a diverting and interesting blog post in half an hour.
Preferably without mentioning The Cardinal. Or at least, not again.
Come on a tangent with me.
I have a fascination with stones. I have a fascination with many natural things because I like to know how the world works. As a result, I have been in the habit of picking up stones where ever I go. Interesting stones obviously, or pretty ones, and I can tell you where and when I picked most of them up and they remind me of days out, holidays etc.
Recently I have been trying to learn how to polish them. I know that it is perfectly possible to use a tumbler but that would be easy. Also running an tumbler involves having a jar of stones spinning round for two or three weeks at a stretch. That’s a lot of noise in the house and involves having something electrical, always on and unsupervised in the garage for days on end. McOther has conniptions at the thought of any piece of Unsupervised Equipment and I have to confess, that despite being the louche laid back one in the marriage, in this case I do rather agree with him. As the Woman Things Happen To it is rather red rag to a bull. The chaos fairies really don’t need any provocation.
Yeh, the tumbler was right out, so I decided to polish them by hand. I looked it up and basically you select the right kind of stone and then you scrub it smooth with increasingly fine grits of sandpaper until it ends up looking shiny.
How hard can that be? I thought.
Mmm always a bad start.
It’s probably less hard if you have a blind clue what stones will actually polish and which ones will best. So far my efforts to are proving to be … interesting. Yes that is in terms of a euphemism for being a bit shit. Part of this is because I have arthritic fingers and part of it is because I’m still learning and as a pupil of this particular art I appear to be extra specially dense. It could be that my wish to polish pretty overrides my good sense in selecting something actually polishable. Even so, I persist in my efforts.
Another factor hampering my efforts is the fact that the stones need to be polished wet, which is difficult at the beginning of the process because the really scrubby sand paper I need to start them off with is only designed to be used dry so tends to dissolve. I’ve no idea why you can’t get wet/dry below 300 grit but it seems that here in the UK it’s not possible. Other smoother papers higher up the polishing ladder are wet/dry and that makes things a lot easier.
Also a drawback with polishing wet is that everything already looks smooth and shiny and it’s difficult to tell how much scritching I need to do sometimes. They’re all beach pebbles so they all look smooth anyway.
I have learned that the best stones to polish are the softer non-porous ones. There is a lot of slag glass on the Suffolk coast which comes from the furnaces that ran at the steel works up north. We have been finding this for years, and it is called ‘pure green’ or sometimes ‘pure blue’ depending (surprise, surprise) on its colour in our house.
The aim with this exercise has been, mostly, to get the stones to look, dry, as vibrant and colourful as they are when wet.
Over the last couple of months I have successfully managed to get a banded flint, a conglomerate of fossilised … things … a piece ofdifferent green I found on the ground in Alsace and some flints to the point where they look about as shiny as a polished stone age axe head. But the best one so far is a great chunk of pure blue which has polished up a lovely dark colour and is even shiny. The slag glass is definitely the best because it starts a pale dusty colour and once polished is much more vivid. But all of them have gone from dusty and dry to the colour they were when they were wet, which is what I was aiming for. They’re not shiny … indeed they’re not even a nod to shiny but it’s the best that I can do.
A partial success then.
Woot.
So I give you … polished stones.
The three along the left hand side are some pure blue in various stages; as found, after 300 grit and after polishing.
