The merry month of May has been far crueler to me this year than April ever could be*, but I now have something beautiful to hold onto: my first lapidary pieces. Two Cranes' Dean and Conne have warmly welcomed me into their workshop, where I'm finding amazing solace in the repetitive, mechanical, yet creative work of shaping and polishing stone. These pieces are from some scraps of aurichalcite that Dean got from a local rock shop; although most aurichalcite appears as tiny, almost hair-like crystals on matrix, many specimens from the Kelly Mine just south of Magdalena, NM, have a botyroidal formation that looks like a solidified thick bubbly blue stew on one side (the crust) and is strikingly striated on the other. (Sorry; couldn't resist the alliteration.) I have more scraps of this and other stones in various stages of grinding and will continue to immerse myself in this new avocation as I figure out what on earth to do next.
(* a T.S. Eliot reference for the non-poetically inclined)
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