I have a big project started with a 30,000 lb. stone, but it's out in the direct sunlight. I've started another project that is in the shade for the first half of the day. That has me getting up at first light to make the most of things.
This is the stone - 8' high x 3'-8" wide x 2'-4" thick and 10,000 lbs. I used a railroad jack to level the stone which will help me keep some of the design elements plumb and level.
This is the progress so far.
It is called Harmony and it deals with the balance between Mankind and Nature.
This is the view of the raw block from the other side while I was still jacking around getting started.
...and this is how that side looks today. The top left corner is what I'll address tomorrow morning.
On my birthday, we found a bunch of fossils on a walk in the woods. Meg wanted to go out and look for some more. We crossed the bridge at Cannelton and checked out the new road cuts on highway 37. It was the first day of summer and the heat index was a solid 100 degrees - but that didn't stop the fun.
We found some Lepidodendrons, which are extinct tall fern-like trees from the Carboniferous time period. We have these coming out of the soil and sandstone at the studio - nothing new to us.
These were different - they are fossils of tree-sized giant horsetails called Calamites.
This is a close-up of a piece of sulfur that was associated with a seam of coal at the first road cut that we checked out.
The last stop was at a popular hunting spot at the intersection of I-64 and 237. I've seen these kind of things before: starting at the bottom, a piece of turtle shell, 4 blastoids, 11 segments of spiraling Archimedes Bryozoa, crinoids, horn coral and 3 brachiopods.
Check out when Meg posts the picture of a well-preserved Copperhead skeleton that she found (complete with fangs). The snake is not a fossil - so anyone deciding to climb those rock ledges, like we did, should be forewarned. I'm sure it was not alone.
