This is my first TumbleStone Blog Post after a time of winter illness. But I have been able to keep the barrels tumbling most of this time.
This Post features 11 recently tumble-polished stones from Gemstone Beach or the area of Te Waewae Bay between Gemstone Beach and the Waimeamea River (see this Post for the area referred to). It can be very difficult to get a perfectly polished stone surface, and close-up photos can be unforgiving in the way they reveal interruptions to smoothness. I have been carefully sorting stones between each stage of tumble polishing, making sure that they get smoother and smoother as they progress. I also put the stones through a 600 grit stage as a pre-polish, to get them smoother. So I thought that the stones I had just finished polishing would be pretty good – they certainly appeared at first sight to have a good polish on them. However, close inspection through photographs often reveal tiny “imperfections”.
I collect mainly relatively smooth beach stones. Often, when I compare photos of them when they were initially found, and while they are wet, they look just as interesting as the polished end-product. The main difference, of course, is that a polished stone always looks bright and colourful and clear whereas a dry unpolished stone always looks dull and its details unclear. The following are the 11 polished stones.
For the first six stones, I have been able to identify the date they were found by me on Gemstone Beach/Te Waewae Bay. I went through all my photos of stones from my Southern Sojourn to do so. Each of these six stones also feature in one of the Posts in the “Southern Sojourn” Series on TumbleStone Blog. Stone one (below) was found on 30 January. I was attracted to the black marks on the gray background. The stone as found on the beach can be seen at the end of this Post. This is the polished stone:
The next stone was found a few days later, on 10 February. It appears towards the end of this Post. An amygdaloidal stone, it’s orange mineral infill catches the eye.
On 13 February, I found a pale quartzite stone with interesting veins. You can see it fresh from the beach in this Post. The polished stone looks like this:
Three days later this stone was collected, maybe a kind of argillite. The cream-coloured part had resisted erosion better than the softer dark green part and were raised on the stone. I had not tried tumbling this type of stone before as I assumed the softer parts would not come out of the process very well. In the end, the tumbling smoothed the surface, wearing back the cream-coloured part to the level of the dark green. You can see the stone as found on the beach here, and the polished product is below:
On 17 April, I found this cylindrical shaped stone. After polishing, it looks like this:
The last of the six stones that feature in the Southern Sojourn Series was found on 20 April this year. What caught my eye were the intense white patches in it. After tumble-polishing, the white patches became more clearly defined, and a new small one appeared on the surface. But its lacy brown veins have lost some of their definition:
The five remaining polished stones have not featured in the “Southern Sojourn” Series but were found by me at Gemstone Beach/Te Waewae Bay:
