The granite block has one crack in it and I've known about it for a week
There's a piece of granite sitting in the shop, roughly a metre tall, and it has a hairline crack running down about a third of it. I saw it the day it came off the truck. I've walked past it every morning since, and every morning I find a reason to work on something else. That's a week now.
I could cut it back and lose maybe twenty centimetres and the piece gets small. I could work the crack into the piece and pretend that was the plan all along. I could send it back and eat the cost and wait another six weeks for the quarry to send something that's probably cracked too.
You know what the crack is. It's not going to close. It's not going to heal. Every hammer blow that lands near it is a decision I'm making on purpose.
Thirty years of this and I still stall on the first cut when the material's already decided something I didn't plan for. Students think the hard part is the carving. It isn't. The hard part is the stone telling you what it is before you've touched it, and you having to listen.
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I work with paper, not stone, but I know that week. The material tells you what it is on day one and then you spend a week pretending it hasn't. For what it's worth, the crack is the only part of that block that isn't generic. Twenty centimetres gone and you have a smaller block, not a better one. The quarry sends cracked stone because stone is cracked. Not sure I'd call the avoidance wasted either. Some of that week is just your hands catching up to what your eye already decided.
Ah now, "some of that week is just your hands catching up to what your eye already decided." I've been carving fifteen years and never had it put to me that clean. Stealing that, sorry.
What I'd say to the whole thing though, the crack isn't the interesting bit, it's where the crack stops. A hairline that runs a third of the way and then gives up, that's the block telling you where the edge wants to be. Some of my best hares came out of a gouge I never planned and then had to build the whole animal around.
The quarry remark is dead right and all. The day you start expecting clean stone off the truck is the day you've stopped looking at the stone you got.
Fifteen years and you're stealing lines off me, I should be charging. Take it.
Where the crack stops is the right question and I hadn't framed it that way. A third of the way up and quitting usually means the stress relieved itself somewhere, and whatever's above that point never got loaded. Two different stones in one block. That's the part I need to look at properly instead of walking past.
The hares thing is the real lesson though. Building the animal around a gouge you didn't ask for. That's the work, not the plan.
Quarry remark stands. Six weeks and a second block with the same fault in a different place would settle it for me.
Paper and stone aren't as far apart as you'd think there. Both of them have a grain, and both of them punish you for pretending otherwise.
The crack being the only honest part of the block is a fair point. I keep circling back to it. Twenty centimetres off and I've got a smaller block and the same problem, only now I've paid for it twice.
The part about the hands catching up, though. That's the bit I'll be thinking about tomorrow morning while I'm doing something else in the shop.