Rock and Roll and Tumble

One of the things that the Marquise and I did on our trip to Grandfather Mountain was to visit the Emerald Village. (It is not down the Yellow Brick Road from the Emerald City). It is this touristy place waaay back in the mountains where you can purchase a bucket of rocks and "pan" for gems and minerals. The buckets are "enriched" so that everyone will get something. The higher priced the bucket, the more it is "enriched". It sounds kinda gimmicky, but it is actually very enjoyable. Not the most exciting time, but its kinda like gambling, you never know when you might hit the jackpot.

Well, we brought our loot home and we had to decide what to do with all these rocks. Well, the Marquise and I are smart, talented (sort of) and fairly crafty (you decide which definition), so we decided to polish the rocks and see if we can make some kind of Christmas presents from them. So, to that end, I started researching how to polish rocks. Everything I found was that we would need a rock tumbler and about a month's time spent tumbling the rocks. The Marquise and I thought we could do better than that, so we bought one of those rotary tools and proceeded to grind and polish away. Sometimes, it is not a good idea to strike out on your own. There is a lot to be said about building on other people's experience. If you haven't figured it out, the rotary tool was less than successful. It was not a complete failure, but it would have been very difficult to achieve the results we wanted. We ended up buying one of the small rock tumblers at a local craft place and some of our gems are happily tumbling away right now. I'll let y'all know how everything works out in a month or so.