Cat's Eye Carving

Carving a Snail Shell

So I started off with a rectangular block of Tetbury limestone. Once I had set out the geometry of this spiral I made a template and applied it to both sides of the stone.

Once carved using a series of chamfers, the stone starts to look like a large comma!!

It was time to re-apply the template to be able to carve the spiral, (look for Bernoulli/Descartes if you wish to know the geometry).

As you can see I am carving down to create the shape, this is all done by eye and touch!

Once I have the required shape, I used a series of different Bouchard hammers to texture the stone-these hammers are excellant for evening out a surface, they look like meat tenderisers!!

I used this finish as the stone was so hard and shelly it would have been incredibly difficult to sand and polish!

This took about 30 hrs and costs £400.