For Christmas, my husband Dave gave me a rock tumbler and a bunch of rough gemstones to tumble. If you are unfamiliar with rock tumbling, let me give you a simple description. Basically, you put your rough stones into a cylinder with water and grit (grit is tiny pieces of gravel). This tumbles until your rocks are smooth and shiny. There are two VERY important things to know about rock tumbling. The first is that it takes a long time to tumble rocks! Let me put it this way. My tumbler has three stages of grit from coarse to very fine. The course stage lasts 9 days. Yes, 9 days of continuous tumbling. Stage 2 is 14 days. Stage 3 is 7 days. It takes 30 days of continuous tumbling to recreate millions of years of tumbling down a river bed (who knew?). This is not a hobby for the instantly gratified, let me tell you! The second important thing to know is it is very loud. My little tumbler is made of plastic and the continuous tumble tumble of the rocks going round and round got very annoying. We finally moved it to the farthest corner of the farthest room in our house. And you can still hear it.
So, I started tumbling my rocks on January 2nd. Since it is only 25 days later, I am still waiting for my shiny rocks to emerge in all their glory. So while I am waiting patiently, I tried to figure out what I would do with these gems. Apparently, wire wrapping is all the rage with these tumbled rocks. So googling wire wrapping led me to fabulous jewelry making blogs and before you can tumble rocks, I am making jewelry. Well, so far, I have made one bracelet, three pairs of earrings and a bookmark. I have spent the last month pouring over the internet saying, I could make that! So behold, here are my creations.
So watch out, friends and relatives. I feel birthday and Christmas gifts in the making. Dave thinks I could become a powerful jewelry magnate on eBay or Etsy and then he could retire. I am just wondering if those rough rocks I put in the tumbler a month ago will be big enough to do anything with!
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1 comment:
Oh this is the most interesting thing I've read all day. I've always been into rocks and desperately wanted a rock tumbler as a kid but it's probably good I didn't get one or I would have gone crazy with all that waiting. However, I am VERY interested in your results.
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