Over this past spring break, I learned how to hand polish rocks. It all started when my mom won a free class, and proceeded to sign up myself and my friend. Only one day before I was going to head home, she sent me a text asking me what time I would want to take the class. I had no clue what she meant by that.Â
She explained the whole story to me and told me where it was. If I’m being honest, my friend and I weren’t thrilled going into our class. For our spring break we drove up north to my hometown, so I knew the people teaching. Still, it was early in the morning and we had no interest. Little did we know we would end up having a great time.Â
The first thing we learned was how to make a pendant. We picked out a pre-cut stone and a shape we thought would compliment our vision. We chose our shape from the options of teardrop, circle, oval, and square. The next step was to trace our shape and cut it out on a saw. In my opinion, this was the hardest part of the entire process. Once we had cut out our rough shape, we had to use a series of different sandpaper grinders with varying levels of grit to refine our stones.
The first three grinders were used to grind our stones to the correct level and roundness. Once we finished, our instructor dried off our stones under a buffer to see if we needed to grind more of our pendant before polishing. We learned that this is one of the most important steps. If there were any notches or scratches in the stone, you would see them crystal clear after the last three grinders, and need to almost completely restart.Â
After we got the all clear, it was a breeze once we began polishing the stones. We had gotten the hang of how to hold our pendants by that point; it was just about how the stones felt and looked. When we finished all of our steps, we dried them off and buffed them with wax to completion.Â
We finished our first lesson very quickly, so our instructor let us polish full stones. I had brought in a small collection of Petoskey stones I had gathered over the years, but we ended up both choosing the two we liked the most. It was much easier to follow the steps after we had already finished our pendants. My friend ended up polishing two full stones. I, on the other hand, only got to finish one full stone and half-polish another, so we could see the differences between before and after.Â
Overall, we had a much better time than we were anticipating. Personally, I loved the class because ever since I was little I’ve been collecting stones that I find at the beach. I’ve been keeping them in jars of water just so I could see their pretty colors and patterns. Now having these beautiful stones that I polished by hand makes me want to go back to the class again and again, or figure out a way to continue this hobby at home.