Negligence, and the Remnant

I suppose I should at least complete the tale of the May Stone project. 

I've been negligent about the blog, here. It's a self perpetuating thing, you know? Very few people stop by here, so I don't have a lot of incentive to post, which means nobody has a reason to stop by. I see the stats on The Lost Era, and Lost Canyon Project blogs, and most of the visitors are from overseas, mainly China or Singapore. Nobody from either place could possibly have any interest in that stuff unless it's to steal images, or harvest them for AI. If I could, I'd treat them to same uncivil  responses I give to phone scammers. But you can't say Go Fuck Yourself to a machine, or some anonymous trolling bot.

Oh well.

So, anyway, let's have a look at where we were with this tall slender stone, and how it finally turned out.

I alawys joke about having the Pee Wee Herman option at hand when creating an abstract figure. No matter how bad you mess up, or if the stone just breaks, you can always take on that snotty voice, and say, I meant to do that, so there. But in all the projects I've done over the years I never had to actually employ the Pee Wee option. 

Until this one.

Here is where we left off in early July:

(I didn't get any pictures through the next couple of phases.)

That center section was going to pass into the globe from the top, and form a sort of tongue protruding into a bowl. The 'wings' on either side were going to curl around it. But when I went to open the globe at the bottom, I overdrilled and spoiled what would have been the center section. Embarrassing. So I had to change course. I went ahead and drilled all the way through the globe. Then, I went to drill again to separate those 'wings,' and once again missed with the drill. Humiliating.

So I fell back on the Pee Wee option. The center section became a sort of swan's neck with the big teardrop at the top. Success! This was actually a better design than I had originally planned, It would have been a prize winner. But:

I was finishing, wet sanding at 400 grit, which is getting quite close to the polishing stage, and the stone literally came apart in my hands. I didn't drop it, or bump it, or chisel on it. It just quietly came apart.

Bummer. So. 

Sometimes you just do the best with what you have, and what I had was two separate chunks of rock. No, it couldn't be drilled and pegged, or glued back together. And here's what came of the remnant:

All things considered, it's not too bad. Certainly not what I had planned, but, you know- What're ya gona' do?

Anyway, tomorrow is Monday, and tomorrow I'm going to begin on this:

48 pounds of translucent orange alabaster. I haven't seen this stuff since the early 1990's. It'll be quite a while before I put a tool to this gem. The most important part of the job is to stare at the stone until it speaks to you. I'm going to listen very, very closely.