Carving Bone
We are currently in Nelson, the second biggest city on the south island. I am not ashamed to say that we were starving after the 4 hour drive and dying for McDonalds or Burger King. The town we were in last night, Westport, was so tiny and the only food there was from places called “cafe” or “takeways,” neither of which sound like nourishing, non-fried food. I don’t care what you say, but McDonalds is a sign of a civilized place! HARUMPH! And, it’s cheap. And, I don’t know if it was the Indian food or maybe the pate that Jim bought a few days ago went bad, but the night before I was hurtin’ and ready for something familiar.
So anyway, after the glacier we drove north to Hokitika, which is the greenstone (jade) capital of the country. I was excited to browse the shops in the tiny little town, but Jim wouldn’t have any of it and we drove another half hour to Greymouth, to a cool hostel called Noah’s Ark, where every room had an animal theme. Ours was a cow.
We also went to a Monteith’s Brewery tour. It is a very small west coat brewery here. It was neat and worth the money just to try all their varieties of beer. When I got back to the hostel I took a nap.
Anyway, I heard there were places where you can carve jade and stone jewelry. I thought it would be so neat to make my own cool thing, from my own hands. And I was getting all these visions of being a natural and becoming a master carver and opening a shop in NYC and all the famous people would come in and I would show them how to carve their own stuff and I would sell beautiful jewelry. Either that or I will be a chef. I had pumpkin, feta, and corn fritters with sweet chili sauce the other day that I HAVE to learn how to make at home; they were awesome.
Anyway, the next morning I went to a place in Hokitika called Stonz N Bonz. I decided to carve bone because it was a lot cheaper than jade. The teacher dude was named Steve and he was very good. He would help you but mostly let you do it yourself. There is another place in town and everyone says that guy practically does it all for you.
So me and two French girls were there and we looked thru some designs and picked out what we wanted. I wished I had thought more and designed my own, because that would have been really special.
Then you chose a piece of beef bone that is thick enough and not ugly. Then trace the design onto the bone and put it in a vice and with a hand saw you cut off big chunks. if you do jade, you have totally different tools that look much cooler. Like a grinder thing that runs with water on it and stuff.
Next you use a spinning machine with rough sandpaper to get closer to the pencil lines. Then a spinning hand tool with tons of different drill bits that either cut, make holes, or smooth. First you drill tiny holes in places where your design is open, then continue grinding and drilling for hours and making the edges round.
When it looks pretty good (your hand will be tired) you go back to the spinning sander machine and use progressively finer and finer sandpapers all over the bone until you get to “2000” sandpaper.
After that, you rub metal polish on it and he puts a fluffy cloth thing on the spinner and you use that to buff it. The last step is to rub oil on the bone and then he strings on the cord for the necklace.
Here it is! Pic is a bit blurry though.
Poor Jim thought I would only be there 3 hours, so he stayed in Hokatika. It ended up being 5 hours and he was SO bored!! Poor guy.
Then we drove to Westport and on the way in Punakaiki there are pancake rocks and blowholes. The coolest thing is when the water hits the rocks and it shoots up out of these “blowholes,” which are fissures in the rocks. We saw some mist shoot out of one, and that was neat. Of course just the short walk to the shore to see them was amazingly beautiful like EVERYthing is in this darn country.
Average west coast scenery.
Right before we arrived in Westport, there were signs for a seal colony, so we thought, what the heck, and we went there. We walked a ways on the path, thinking they wouldn’t be there this time of the year, and sure enough, there were about 20 seals hanging out on the rocks below and grunting and scotting around. Pretty neat!
Earlier, on the road, there was a caution sign earlier for penguins, but I didn’t see any. We did see some funny flightless birds called…..shoot, I forgot. A weka or something.
The next morning we drove straight through 4 hours here to Nelson. On the way is the biggest swing bridge in NZ, which is over the Buller Gorge. It was neat.
Here is some lady on it.
The plan was next to go kayaking at the Abel Tasman National Park, but it is so chilly and rainy that neither of us are too excited for it. We might go on another wine tour.
Our car has to be back in Christchurch on the 18th, so we’ve actually got loads of time and are only looking forward to Kaikoura, just north of Christchurch. Then we fly to Auckland and we’re planning on just 10 days for the north island, then it’s about 5 days in Rarotonga and only a couple days in Tahiti, then to LA and home!
Tags: New Zealand
Kelly
Hiya Kelly!
Nice bone jewlery!!
About the guy who posts advertisments and other BS to your blog: his main reason for doing so might very well be to get a higher ranking on Google (and perhaps other search engines, depending on how they work). The more links he can get to his site, the higher up on Google’s search result list he will come. Blog-spamming has become a big thing, from what I’ve heard.
Actually, if the guy is smart, he’s not posting anything manually to blogs… – he might very well have a “robot” do it for him. That is, a piece of software that searches the net (like a search engine’s robot), and when it finds a form (like the one I’m writing in right now), it automatically fills in the fields and posts the form.
You might be able to make it more difficult for such an automated process if you made some changes to the form layout. The robot might get confused if it doesn’t quite recognize the form… for example if you change the name of the fields or their order.
*but, then again, if the script is smart, it might not be fooled…*
A sure way of stopping automated spam is to add a test for the user, to prove that it’s a human user entering the text. You’ve probably seen these tests on some places… They usually have an obscure image with some characters on it, and then the user has to enter those exact characters into a field in the form for the form to work.
A’ight, gotta go. Take care! Have a great wrap-up to your travels!
Your creation is beautiful. I was expecting some round blob, not something so intricate.
I agree with Claire! That piece of bone is pretty cool looking- who knew you could do that with a beef bone?!
I hope you guys have a great last leg of your trip… time went by fast these past few weeks/months, huh?