It is the lighter-coloured stones that normally attract my eye on the beach. This stone is a particularly dark one, but the veins that criss-cross it caught my eye and a closer look suggested it might be a quartzite. I find the dark veins attractive along with the complexity of the stone.
The flashes of dark red in it add further interest:
I first visited this beach near Timaru in June 2021, following up a mention of it in a Post in the “New Zealand Lapidary, Rocks, Minerals, Fossils” Facebook Group made by Sascha Stoddart. Sascha crafts with copper wire and oiled stones, as beautifully presented on her Facebook Page “Wire on the Rocks”.
As Sascha states: “Wire on the Rocks originated from the discovery of a piece of pink Rhodonite, which I found in May 2020, when walking along the beach in Timaru. Within two weeks I had found a second piece, and had developed a beach stone obsession which rapidly escalated and resulted in a growing collection of treasure. I decided to try my hand at wire wrapping some of the stones, and was soon creating jewellery and sculptures, and experimenting and exploring different ideas. In February 2021, and more than 130 creations later, I named my creative pursuit Wire on the Rocks.”
Some of Sascha’s stones are found on the beach that can be accessed at the end of Scarborough Road, just south of Timaru. I made my first visit there in the late afternoon of 5 June 2021. Once I found the access point, after trying a couple of dead-ends, I did a quick reconnaissance of the beach and returned the next day when I found Stone #21 (see the entry for Sunday 6 June 2021 in this Post). At that time, I also found a larger quartzite of similar hue.
Stone #21 originally had a small chunk out of it (see photo below) which I smoothed away using at least a couple of tumbles with 220 grit. Using 80/100 grit would also have done the job, and more quickly, but the 220 grit tumbles gave me more control over the shaping process as I wanted to minimise the reduction in size of the stone.
I then used a 400 grit tumble followed by a 600 grit tumble to prepare the stone for polishing as best as I could. It spent 11 days in tin oxide tumble polish followed by a borax burnishing tumble for three days, completing the process on 19 January 2022. I could have burnished it longer but I was anxious to make the batch available for this series of Posts as it was my first batch of polished Timaru stones. Stone #21 has ended up completely smooth but definitely smaller in size than originally, being 4.5 cms long, 3 cms wide, and about 0.75 cms thick. I am very happy with the finished product.
The Index to the January 2022 Stone of the Day Series is here.
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