Treasure Hunting

The cold weather snuck up on me a bit this year.  We’ve been having gorgeous days here for the last couple of weeks, but this weekend the temperatures started to fall at night.  Right now, it’s about 40 degrees Fahrenheit, but I am refusing to turn on the heat since it should get up to 70 or 80 today as summer tries to make its last stand.  That’s autumn weather in the desert mountains for you.  The snow could arrive anytime now.

I decided to go ahead and post one of the photos I took of the African picture jasper a couple of days ago when I was photographing the ocean jasper.  I love the markings on these pieces, and I think that whoever decided to name it “picture jasper” should get a naming award.  Each stone of this type does seem to have its own story to tell through its markings.  It reminds me a lot of ancient writings that have been found on cave walls.  This particular one brings images of a burning desert to my mind.

If you’re sick of looking at pictures of agate, you might want to go get a snack instead of reading this post.  I’m wanting a bit of a snack myself but since I can eat and type at the same time, I’m good to go.

The agate pictured here is a type of banded agate from Africa known as Blue Lace Agate.  It has some similar colorings of the Blue-Gray Agate from Brazil, but they are much lighter in tone due to all of the white mixed in with the blues.  A few of the pieces, like the one in the photograph below even have some additional pastel-like bands included with the standard blue and white colorings.

Blue Lace Agate typically runs at the higher end of the Mohs hardness scale for agate.  The stones in this batch are a bit higher than a 7, maybe a 7.5.  I haven’t decided what I want to do with this batch yet.  There are a couple of pieces in there that I’d like to polish, but I think that I may end up using most of them in a candle centerpiece with a winter theme.  Even though the stones come from Africa, they make me think of winter when I look at them with the crisp blue and white colors.  Of course, since I have so many projects going on currently, the stones are just sitting in a box in the corner right now.  Those boxes in the corner are really starting to stack up.

The sanding cycle finally finished yesterday for the jasper that I have had in the rock tumbler.  Now comes the fun part!  I took the photograph here after I got all of the silicon carbide washed off of the stones.  They’re still wet in the photo so it gives something of an idea of how they’re going to turn out when complete.

It will still be about two more weeks before it’s finally polished, assuming that everything goes well.  They’re just starting the pre-polishing cycle now and that should take about a week, give or take a day.  Then the polishing cycle will take about another week. 

Depending how the stones look after that, they may need a few extra days in a burnishing cycle.  It’s really hard to give an estimate on that, though, until I actually see the results after the polishing cycle.  If I had to guess, I would say that some burnishing will be needed but probably only about three days worth.

As the stones go through the grinding and sanding stages, they lose some of their volume so it’s important to add some type of filler in the final stages.  Up until now, I have been using small plastic pellets.  I hate these stupid pellets with a passion.  They’re supposed to be reusable, but they’re so annoying that I end up just throwing them away.  Then I get even more annoyed that I’m wasting something that’s supposed to be reusable.  I finally broke down and bought some ceramic media to use as filler.  I’m trying it for the first time in this pre-polishing cycle.  I can already tell that I’m going to like it better since it’s bigger and heavier.