It is Anthony’s birthday in a few days and one of the things he said he wanted to do was to do Jade carving in New Zealand. After much research I found a class where you can carve your own Jade pendant. Jade in New Zealand is called Pounamu. We arrived a Wai Kaha Jade in Christchurch and were greeted by the guys who worked there who invited into the workshop to get started.
The first step is we were given a huge box of Pounamu and a spray bottle and were put to work to find our pieces. Its really cool as its so hard to tell the colour of them until you spray then with water. We ended up settling on a couple of pieces of stone.
The next step was to draw the design and shape you wanted to carve on the stone. We stayed with simple shapes designs as we have never done anything like this before.
Next it was cutting time and we used a table saw type machine to cut the extra jade off. This was a little tricky but eventually we got it cut down. Next was multiple steps of shaping on different grinders. We had to shape it, bevel the edges and smooth the corners and it took ages to get it right.
After much more grinding and shaping we finally ended up with our shape and then it was time for hand sanding time. We had to use 3 different grits of sand paper to get it as smooth as possible.
Once we were done the team at Wai Kaha Jade finished it off by giving it a buff, giving it an oil bath and putting the string on. We both are really happy with how they worked out. It was such a fun activity.
We were then off in the car on a 3 hour drive down South to Lake Tepako. We stopped at a giant salmon on the way. The roads were absolutely stunning we drove through snow capped mountain areas and beautiful rolling hills. We stopped in at the Fairlie bakery as I had read they have the best pies. We got there and ordered a pork belly and apple sauce and we got a cronut and let me say the reviews were not wrong they were amazing!
We arrived into Tekako and there was snow everywhere which was cool. Th view from our room looks out over the mountains. We stayed in and cooked dinner tonight and then headed out to try and see some stars. Our cameras did not work very well but man the sky was stunning you could see the whole Milky way. Anthony got so distracted by the sky he just stopped in a puddle while looking at the sky. Its been a great but long day.
