#rock collecting
My niece (she is three) gave me these for Christmas! She knows I like Cool Rocks and she wanted to get me some. Her parents took her shopping and she picked them out herself.
A sparkly pyrite heart and a colorful piece of bismuth! What excellent taste! A truly superb addition to my collection!
Hey, wanna see a Cool Rock?
Here’s an interesting piece from my collection. This awesome specimen is mordenite on stilbite! The fluffy puffball-looking formations are mordenite, and the peach-colored crystals they’re growing on are stilbite. They’re both part of the zeolite group of minerals.
The mordenite in this piece is especially cool! Mordenite can form in all kinds of different crystal habits, like asbestos-like fibers or needle-like acicular sprays. But these weird puffballs are my favorite form of mordenite. They look soft and fluffy, like cotton balls or little puffball mushrooms. But these formations are actually more like spikeballs. They’re hard, solid rock!
Poke poke… nope, not fluffy at all. It feels completely solid and has a rough, spiky texture. Can you believe a rock could just form in nature that way? What a cool and unusual rock!
I really need to learn how to polish big flat rocks.
Finally getting warm enough to cut again! Most of these are from the claim.
Went crystal hunting for stilbite today! I found this place a few years ago but it is kinda a scramble to get up there so I really hadn’t been back until today. Worth the climb, I think.
Playing with rock over the weekend!
Products of yesterday’s cutting!
On the subject of 100% natural things that can absolutely harm you, this is Trent agate. It’s from one tiny deposit in eastern Oregon and is allegedly no longer able to be found and collected but still circulates in quantity in the lapidary hobby world. That stunning vibrant red firework pattern is likely Realgar, a very beautiful arsenic sulfide. It’ll decay with time to bright yellow Orpiment, a historical pigment whose toxicity is well-documented! While I’m not going to make myself sick cutting this one slab, my saw oil now has trace arsenic and orpiment in it and will transfer tiny amounts to everything else I cut. Opse. At tiny amounts on not-food-objects it’s a negligible concern but it’d absolutely harm my long term health to be repeatedly breathing in the dust and dust-laden oil off the saw. I’m going to let the oil settle, then pour it off and discard the sludge. Not worth scrubbing it off everything else I cut!
@ people when they ask why I’m cutting rock: why aren’t you?
Excuse me while I go discover tiny worlds inside the pebbles underfoot…
Washing crystals! Trying to make a few craft demos to get some of my neighbor kids interested; it’s going to be a hard summer for them, so the more local cheap outdoor hobbies the better.
