Mountain’s Bones: The Hardest Art

One of the oldest earth crafts is stonemasonry. This had its earliest starts in the prehistoric technique of flint-napping, chipping sharp tools out of pieces of flint, and worked its way up to the Egyptian pyramids and the great temples of Rome. Home stoneworking may seem like too great a task for the homesteader, but small stone blocks can be chiseled into garden tiles, altars, and memorial stones. If nothing else, pagans need more gravestones for their resting places, if they choose to go back into the earth. Stone work is working with the bones of the earth itself, the unadulterated hardest material on the planet. Working in stone means that you intend your work to last.

To work with stone, you must imitate the action of wood and water. In Nature, stone is altered by windborne sand, or waterborne silt, or ice or plants that swell within its cracks. Large stones - and in some areas of the country, like mine, you’re digging up large stones on a yearly basis, every spring - can be split by means of drilling and chiseling V-shaped slots all around it on an even plane, and driving wedges into them. You hit the wedges one at a time, all around, until the rock splits. The traditional method of splitting stone that has grain (like granite) is to drill holes and put in wooden pegs, which you then soak with water. As the wood swells, it can split even granite. Because granite splits even and regularly, many of the granite curbstones one encounters are often split rather than cut.

To smooth a rough face, use five processes: First, working from the outside edges on toward the middle at a diagonal, chisel rough parallel lines with a “point”, or pointed chisel. If it’s a large area, you may need first a large point and then a smaller one. Second, go over the ridges with a “claw”, or serrated-edge chisel. Third, use a flat chisel to even out the narrower ridges. Fourth, go over the rough bumps with a carborundum stone, making circular motions, wetting the stone as necessary. Fifth, sand it with first wet and then dry sandpaper in increasingly finer grades until you achieve the level of polish desired.

Soapstone is one of the easiest stones to work with; my wife Bella does it with a Dremel tool. The old Norse, with access to many steatite deposits, made all sorts of kitchen equipment with soapstone, from spindle whorls to bowls to baking slabs. Again, when working it, you imitate natural processes. In working with precious and semiprecious stones, this process continues. Stones are ground or abraded to desired shapes on wet, abrasive spinning wheels; he action of water carrying away the abraded material. You can tumble stones in a slurry or abrasive and water, in a tumbler that rotates slowly, achieving a smoother and smoother finish through changing the slurry through finer and finer grits, until one achieves a lustrous tumbled polish. This process can take weeks, but stone is the slowest-living of all Earth’s substances, and it takes patience.

Precious and semiprecious stones are “dopped” onto wooden dowels with wax or epoxy so that they can be handled, and ground into shapes with abrasive wheels. The most common form is a curved lens of polished stone referred to as a cabochon. Jade, agate, and many other stones all make beautiful cabochons. Faceted gems are usually made from clear crystals, in imitation of actual crystalline forms seen in nature, while opaque colored stones are usually cut “en cabochon”.