Finished finessing cottages

 

I spent another 4 hours today finessing the stone cottages today. This included: tidying up the shapes; smoothing the various planes of the cottage forms; grinding away excess stone; and creating a chipped textured area around each cottage. The photo above shows me using a diamond grinder to take excess stone off. I was working around the back of the shed out of the direct wind. I like the art nature of the sieve on the wall!!!!

I chose the five cottages in the photo below for finessing and for the installation that will go into the exhibition; and you can see I bagged the larger offcuts of each as these will become part of the installation.

A close up of the grinding process - done outside - fine day today - all the safety gear on. I got Fiona to take the photos - thanks F.

In the shed I then used stone carving chisels to create the textured areas. As you can see from the photo below the stones are extremely hard and the chisels suffered. A fair bit of work will be required to restore the chisels.

I didn't know until later but Fiona took a few photos of me chiseling through a very dirty workshop window.

Below are the finished five including a couple of individual cottage photos.

As you can see from the photo below I have created a couple of spares as I was not confident about the stone for Sherray and Sleiteil.

I am pleased with the outcome; and given the hardness of the stones I am also pleased this work is complete.

Hard to see the progress

 Above - repairing a starburst chip on an ornate crystal box.

Today I decided to work on a repair job I'm doing for a friend - stabilising the cracks in a crystal box; and replacing chips that broke off and were lost when the piece was accidentally damaged.

I could not replace the chips with a clear hard setting material so we have agreed to us a product that sets like a white ceramic - though softer in that it can be filed with diamond files such as below.

But the repair needs to be built up. I thought that two applications of the product would do the job; but after quite a bit of filing today I was not satisfied and have added a third layer in a few parts.

Some photos of the filing of the product - I used my jewellers magnifying lamp to give me clear view of what I needed to remove.

You can see where i needed to add bit more product.

So the repair will be completed next week after the product has dried and can be filed.