Three Months Into This Thang

 So here we are, a little over three months since I rolled the big stone out of the garage. I needed help getting it up on the table. I started out with 115 pounds of crystal, and cut 18 pounds off the bottom for the base. Now, if my arithmetic is sort of close, that left 97 pounds of rock for the carving. It weighed in this morning at just over fifty pounds. So, I've turned about 45 pounds of stone to dust and scrap. That's a lot of dust.   Now, I can lift it, and turn the piece without much effort.

Monday and Tuesday of last week I worked on the large egg-shaped lower bowl, and the curves on the neck that drops through the upper bowl. By Wednesday I realized that it would take days to get to the bottom of the bowl with the tools I have. 

 

This coincided with the weekly email from the Stone Carving Supplies web site.  Milani tools aren't cheap. Three clicks from the catalog cost me a two hundred bucks. But it got me three new rifflers, a 10" spoon, a 14" spoon, and a 14" knife.

 

 

  I ordered Thursday; the tools came Saturday. The big spoon (center) is new, very sharp, and proved to be an aggressive excavator. By the time I put up Saturday afternoon I was within sight of my goal.

 

I'll get the last of the excavation done in the next day or two, and then the work comes down to fine tuning the whole composition. I'm not doing grooves, or surface detail on this piece, so the polishing work should go pretty fast. This is the fun part, but it's also the part where it starts getting a little scary. As the walls of the carving grow thinner, the stone begins to ring like a chime under the rasps and files. The bowls  catch and hold more, and more light.   Everything glows, and the crystal won't cast a shadow on itself. It's often hard to see where you're going. Shapes, and curves start changing very fast. No stroke of the file can be undone and the margin for error gets smaller with every pass.

 As Confucius says: To exceed is as bad as not to reach. The form gets "better" only to a point, and then it's time to stop. It's very, very easy to get carried away on some small detail, and over-carve the piece. You gotta' know when let it be.

All in a sudden, that moment is coming up fast.