Cool fresh start

[Ken Barnes <barnestrav@zzzzzzzzz>]

I mostly lurk, but have pitched in from time to time when a topic
arises that I have some experience in.

I am Ken Barnes from Seattle, Washington.  I have been carving about 8
years now.  I started out with really hard stone, immediately lost the
points on my steel chisels, moved back down the spectrum to alabaster
until I equipped myself with the right diamond tooling, and then moved
back up the hardness scale, first to marble, then to basalt, my main
love.  I also like "fancy" stones, my term for stones that have some
sort of feature (such as fossils or interesting coloration) and a form
that I can enhance.  I only get to play in my studio on the weekends,
because I must support myself and my landscape painter wife through
office work during the week (commercial real estate appraiser).

Today I went with my studio mate Karl to hunt stone in the mountains
outside of town.  We were mostly looking for dunite, a rare stone from
the earth's core that happens to make up most of a ridge a couple hours
north of town.  It weathers to an orange brown on the outside, but is a
jade green inside, and compares to a tough marble in hardness. We also
found some very interestingly weathered slate (we were hunting along a
river).  I also wrestled a 200-lb hunk of highly variegated marble into
the back of the Subaru.  Marble is soft enough and light enough
compared to the rest of the stones in these mountain rivers that it
rarely survives much of a tumble downstream.  There were a couple 1 to
2-ton marble hunks in the river, but neither my back nor my Subaru
would put up with that.

I am serving my last year as president of the Northwest Stone Sculptors
Association www.nwssa.org , a local group of about 250 sculptors who
get together for lots of reasons, but are mostly known for our
symposia.  We have three each year, with the 10-day event in July
attracting 125 people this year.  While I love the organization, I also
am looking forward to reclaiming a couple hours of this time for my
studio.

Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the number of e-mails that I get over the
course of a week, but I can never just delete them. I have a word file
that I periodically add to titled "Bill Knight quotes.doc".  I really
enjoy the way Norman can get people going with his direct questions.
And I love to read and imagine the experiences of the "old hands" on
the list who send their stone wisdom into my home.

Thanks to all,

Ken Barnes