Eight Recent Gemstone Beach Finds Polished, Including a Small White Orbicular Jasper and a Piece of Petrified Wood

Most of the stones I collect are already smooth and you can see the details in them very well when they are wet. However, when they are dry, they tend to become quite dull. So tumble polishing gives them a permanent wet look, as well as removing some of their rough bits, if they have any. I recently finished tumble polishing some of my finds from my two most recent trips to the bottom of the South Island, in September 2024 and March 2025. This Post features eight from Gemstone Beach. Note that where there are “before” and “after” photos, they were taken with a different camera and I’m still getting used to the new one.

The first featured stone is a small white orbicular jasper, the only one like this I have ever found. I picked it up on the last of my Gemstone Beach fossick earlier this year, on Friday 28 March, and the Post for that day has some information on orbicular jaspers. The first set of photos below is of the stone when found:

I was reluctant to tumble it too much as it is small, two centimetres at its widest. So it underwent one 400 grit stage before going straight into polish. As a result, it’s not as smooth as it could be. However, by polishing it, its details are now permanently on show, otherwise you would need to wet the stone every time you wanted to see those details. The first side of the polished stone:

The other side of the polished stone:

I found a piece of petrified wood on Gemstone Beach on Wednesday 25 September 2024, a reasonably rare find these days. The stone when found:

The following photos are of the tumble polished wood, though not strictly comparable as the first three below are of a different side to the first three above, and the second lot of three below had to be rotated to show the correct comparable orientation of the stone:

The most gorgeous find I came across on Gemstone Beach on Wednesday 19 March 2025 was a tiny, one centimetre long, hematite poppy jasper, the size of my small fingernail. This is what it looked like when found:

After tumble polishing:

Another very small stone (two centimetres long) that I recently polished. I can’t find it in my fossicking Posts so don’t know when I found it on Gemstone Beach. I’m also not sure of its identification but was attracted by the lattice-like pattern on it:

One of the trace fossil argillite stones I have polished. Such stones don’t really take a polish but the tumbling clarifies the traces nicely:

You can read more about these trace fossils in “Southern Sojourn 2023(18): The Tattooed Rock, The Trace Fossils… Revisiting Gemstone Beach’s Trace Fossil Stones, February 2023”.

I like the range of colours in the next small stone – it is two and a half centimetres long:

The seventh stone in this Post is a good example of the kind of details I like in a stone, revealed by the close-up photos. There are tiny colourful veins and tiny patches of brecciation – here is the polished stone:

I found this seventh stone on Gemstone Beach on 27 March 2025 and the first side looked like this at the time:

I chose the last stone to feature in this current Post because it has hematite in it, a mineral I have an interest in. Holding this stone on a certain angle to the light shows up small patches of the distinctive metallic grey of hematite, even though the photos don’t show it:

The tumble polishing continues…