Serpentine Pendants and Arrowheads

Having sold all of my serpentine pendants, I took some time between commissions to make another batch from the pieces of serpentine we found at the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall a few years ago.

I always make sure that serpentine is kept continually wet when working with it- it’s not only easier to cut and shape, but some serpentine can contain chrysotile (or white asbestos). I should state that pieces made from serpentine pose absolutely no health risk- it’s only during the cutting/grinding stages that respirable powder could be produced. I used to work with serpentine in a small water bath, but it clouded quickly and it was time-consuming having to continually change the water. After some reading, I rigged up a DIY lapidary water-drip system. This is essentially a 5-litre container, a length of aquarium tubing and a laboratory clamp! It works very well, saves a lot of time when making a large batch and the size/rate of drips is easily controlled with the clamp;

As well as making some pendants in a similar shape and style that I have done previously, I wanted to try shaping some to resemble flint arrowheads. For these (and the other pendants), I used a large variety of diamond burrs and attachments with my Foredom H44T handpieces- circular saws, corers, ball burrs, cylinder burrs and flame burrs.

For the arrowheads, the barbs and tang were cut with the diamond circular saw and the ‘notches’ (to imitate the knapped edges) were initially marked with a cylinder burr, then taken to depth with needle files. Once the edges were shaped, I used different grades of wet and dry paper to smooth them out (400, 600 and 1200). The final stage before tumbling was to smooth over the whole surface of each with three grades of 3M Scotch-Brite radial bristle discs under the water-drip system.

All the stones were placed in my stone tumbler and tumbled for either 30 hours (arrowheads) or 40 hours in total (with regular checking and reduction in grit grades). Finally, all stones were buffed with tin oxide paste and burnished in the tumbler for an hour with soap flakes and dishwasher rinse aid.

I assembled these pendants with 2 mm thick black waxed cord and they are each tied with adjustable slip knots. You can see all of my recent serpentine pendants by following this link to my Etsy shop.

Serpentine Pendants

Any serpentine pendants I currently have for sale are listed for sale in my Etsy shop- just follow this link;

https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/HatchBurnCarve?section_id=25592326

On various journeys down to the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall, we picked up and bought a few pieces of pebble sized (and larger) serpentine. Having stored them outside my workshop for a couple of years, I finally had a chance to start working on them before Christmas 2018.

I started these pendants by coring with diamond corers and shaping each piece with diamond burrs, files and wet and dry paper. I then hand polished the surface and the cored sections of each stone with 1200 grade wet and dry paper.

Once I had the desired rough shapes of each stone, these were placed in my stone tumbler for just over a week with an increasing fineness of polishing compound.

After the process of stone polishing, the serpentine was ‘burnished’ and each stone was hand polished with a lint-free cloth to give a mirror-like finish.

The pendants are assembled using natural 2 mm leather and tied using double slip-knots for an adjustable drop length.