Amber Love

[dagmarjung]

I have found a new hobby: Amber polishing.

Comments

[lenine2]

Ooh, prehistoric flies! How utterly cool. As much as I hate bugs, I would be tickled to own some encased in amber.

[dagmarjung]

They can't escape that way! :-)
And yes, prehistoric flies are cool. I have never been so delighted to see a fly.

[tehta]

Ooh, Poland is full of amber too. It'd be really fun to wrap some with wire for jewellery purposes.

[dagmarjung]

I plan to go to a goldsmith and ask her to make pendants out of some of them, with silver.

[tehta]

Do you use sandpaper with a machine, or do it all by hand?

I bet it'd be really satisfying to polish one myself *and* build a setting for it. By the time I can afford such things I am likely to be quite good at bead-wrapping...

[dagmarjung]

You don't need a machine. In the museum, they have amber polishing clinics for kids, using nothing more but two grades of sandpaper (100 and 600) and toothbrushes and toothpast for polishing. At home I can use my Dremel machine with grinding and polishing tools, which is good for getting into small dents and crevices, but it is not necessary for a good result.

I can't do a good setting myself, all I could do is drilling a hole into the amber and wear it on a string.

The price of unpolished amber is not so high, I was purprised to notice. I paid 1 Euro for 1 gramm. Amber is such a lightweight material that some gramm take you a long way. The bigger pieces were more expensive, 1,50 Euro or more per gramm, but they were much too big to make decent jewelry anyway.

[wulfila]

Your amber pieces look lovely, and finding prehistoric flies inside must have been a nice surprise. :)

[dagmarjung]

I am totaslly delighted about the prehistoric flies! But I love also the amber pieces that are just amber. I'll keep some for myself, others are for Christmas gifts.

[elvses]

Everyone else has already said nice things about amber, which I do like (mainly because it looks like a stone yet is as light as plastic), so I'll break the trend and say something ridiculous.

Do you suppose amber existed in Middle-earth, or is that world too young for any to have formed yet? I'm sure if would be something Elves would enjoy, if it existed at all.

[dagmarjung]

I am not so sure about timelines and changing geography in Middle-earth, but I guess they had no amber.
I rather imagine that the amber we find today was produced by the legendary great forests of Middle-earth, like Mirkwood and Lothlorien.