Some more recent pics of the chunk of quartz. Its inner beauty is slowly starting to come out.

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Some more recent pics of the chunk of quartz. Its inner beauty is slowly starting to come out.
The original form of a big ol' chunk of smoky quartz that I've been working on for a little while. Wanted to rescue these from my phone before they got buried in the photos library.
someone could probably say something pretty about fossils, constellations, and stars in the sky
Onondaga Cave State Park, Missouri.
Explore:
Explorations of a whole bunch of parks found on the Ozark Plateau.
Finds from a grab bin: ocean jasper, carnelian agate, chevron amethyst, moss agate, mahogany obsidian, sodalite, moonstone, fossilized (???), and amazonite
Me when I see rocks.
Managed to buy only four pieces at this year's fairs: chocolate calcite, K2 granite, ruby in fuchsite, and lepidolite.
crystals with landscapes of nature
Petoskey stones ~ fossilized coral that lived 350 million years ago - the rocks rounded in the surf along the shore of Lake Michigan near Petosky, Michigan
Purple Yellow Fluorite from Elmwood Mine, Carthage, Smith County, Tennessee // Blue Fluorite From Inner Mongolia, China
Ethiopian opal geode
Very very hard boiled egg
…..you know I would like to thank @voyoock for this reply because tbh I kind of wanted to break one of these open and taste it myself.
Just think, these stones contain the water from ancient seas from millenia ago, and a well educated scholar STILL couldn’t resist their pull. Not one of us is immune to the siren call of ancient tide pods.
cracking open an old one with the boys
Sooo, since I can't do much rockhounding or tumbling during the winter, I'm back to acquiring shiny rocks elsewhere. Here are my most recent additions, from various places:
1-5 (white & green + green & orange): Gifts from my sister from her trip out of state. She says they were unlabeled, but I think they are all or mostly varieties of tree agate.
6 (white, black, and teal): K2 jasper (azurite in granite)
7 (brown with orbicular pattern): turritella agate
8 (gray, white, and purple-red): ruby in feldspar
9 (iridescent orange-ish): peach moonstone
10-11 (light green-blue): amazonite
12 (light green and white): green larimar (almost certainly synthetic, but still pretty)
13 (white, black, and teal): K2 jasper again
14-15 (brown swirly): chocolate calcite
16 (brown bandy): aragonite
17 (green and purple): fluorite
18-19 (clear yellow-orange): honey calcite
20 (purple and white): lepidolite
21 (red-orange glittery): red goldstone
22 (gray with red orbicular pattern): ocean jasper
23 (grayish, clear with inclusions): a large piece of smoky rutile quartz
despite what popular opinion may lead you to believe, some rocks actually do have scientifically-proven auras! Unfortunately, those rocks are uranium and the aura is cancer.
Unfinished clear and smoky quartz and tiger's eye. All are from the tumblers except the clear quartz (top left), which I rescued from the local hocus-pocus shop in the mall. It was in pretty rough shape (I've done some cleanup on it already) and I figured it was up to me to give it a good home.
All of the tiger's eyes have also received some polishing but aren't quite finished. The bottom right piece is missing its chatoyance - not sure if it lost it in the tumbler or if it went in like that.
Handful of pieces that are going into an oxalic acid bath today to remove some of the iron staining. Mostly new finds and a few older ones that didn't clean up well before.
I've paused the tumblers for now. One of my geckos who live near the tumblers is pretty sick (she has lymphoma :/) and I've decided to keep things quiet around her so as to not add to her distress. Also, it turns out that cleaning out tumbler barrels is a huge pain in the ass during the winter when I can't use the outside faucet (since rock tumbler slurry can't go down the drain). The long and the short of it is that I may not start the tumblers up again until spring. Meanwhile I'm hand-polishing a few of the nicer quartz and tiger's eye pieces that came out of the barrels. Most need to be kicked around a bit more.
Quartz tumble update! Here's how the full batch is looking. I don't think they're quite ready for the next stage yet, so I'm throwing them back in the barrel with some fresh coarse grit, but wanted to get a shot of how they're coming along.