On second thought, that title might be a little too ambitious for a single blog post. Maybe, “Rock Tumbling and My Ignorance—Chapter 1”. Let me explain…
Some years ago I asked my father if he had a rock tumbler I could borrow. I don’t remember what he said at the time, but knowing him it was probably something like, “let me look, I think I have a few.” He did have some and he brought over one I could use for general purpose rock tumbling.
Getting started straight away I put the tumbler in the craft room and then took further steps some months later as I moved it to the attic. There it’s sat, looking at me at the top of the stairs every time I ventured into the attic, silently saying, “you asked for me.”
But today was the day, friends. As I prepared to use the tumbler I found out how very little I knew about rocks and tumbling. In preparation, I had ordered a set of four tumbling grits, from coarse to polishing. With the tumbler in the attic and the four stages of polishing grit all I needed were some enthusiastic children to collect rocks and I was set.
My neighbor’s daughter, Keira, who is nine, was the biggest advocate of the project and the most help. She suggested we collect rocks from the creek below our house and after lunch my two children, my next-door-neighbors and their two children, and Keira headed down the treacherous slope in the far back of our yard heading towards the creek.
The creek was wet, my left rain boot had a large tear in it, the boys wanted to throw sticks and rocks and mostly other things occurred instead of rock collecting for a while. Keira and I stayed on task, collecting what we thought were more than we could fit into the tumbler so we could winnow down the list of candidates when we got back up the hill.
When we got home we discovered we didn’t have enough rocks to fill the tumbler to the needed two-thirds full for maximum tumble performance…so I grabbed some random, non-ideal rocks from the yard itself.
Rocks were washed, cleaned, scrubbed, washed some more and then even some more by Keira who wanted to make sure we didn’t tumble dirty rocks. I prepared the tumbler and re-read the instructions from online.
I need to rewind a bit to this morning because it wasn’t until then that Keira and I looked up how to do this whole tumbling thing. I knew you put rocks and grit in, tumbled for a while, put in a finer grit, tumbled for a while, repeating until the rocks were shiny. This was when we learned all about what we didn’t know.
First of all, each tumbling stage (there are four) takes SEVEN DAYS. Yes, that is correct, you leave the tumbler on for a week, running constantly, and then you see what you have. Three more times you do this which would take the entire month of February on a non-leap year (or any other twenty-eight days). It’s not until the end that you find out if you really like what you selected. I am all about now, instant gratification, not waiting. I’m impatient. This is going to feel like forever.
Secondly, I needed to know the size of the tumbler. I had to put the right amount of grit based on size, but my older tumbler had zero information on it. I made an educated guess based on several factors and added a pinch more for good measure.
The next thing we didn’t know was something termed, “garbage in, garbage out” which described non-ideal rocks for tumbling. Jagged, concave, irregular or soft rocks weren’t going to make pretty tumbled stones. Also, they would make the process more challenging because those stones could damage the others and reduce the effectiveness of the polishing substances. Guess what kinds of stones are available in our creek? If you guessed “garbage rocks” you won seven points.
I’m not sure if we have pretty rocks. Some are very dark, some are definitely white quarts and some are I have no idea at all. There may be a future update on this longer-than-expected project in the near future—unless it’s an embarrassing craft failure. My expectations are low though, knowing these are kids and kids love anything they help make.
The Big Boy Update: My husband and daughter were playing tic-tac-toe at dinner out tonight. My son said, “dad, you’re pretending you’re not that good at the game and letting her win.” About three minutes later he turned to me and said, “mom, can you play tic-tac-toe with me and pretend you’re not very good?” I didn’t need to try though—he decided he got two moves for every one of mine and won with ease.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter is particular about clothes. In one way she has very specific opinions and that’s if the article of clothing is “cold”. This is not what you might think—it’s if she feels it’s cold to the touch. Some of the softest cottons she won’t put on because they’re initially cold to the touch when you pull them out of the drawer. I spent one morning handing her all sorts of warm things to wear and had many items rejected because they were “cold”. This isn’t all the time, it’s only on mornings when she’s cold to begin. Because it’s gotten warmer now the complaints of cold clothes are much less frequent.
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