Bone Carving - Nelson and Abel Tasman Weekend

When we were trying to figure out what to do on our last day in Nelson, Brittany stumbled across this website for this guy who teaches bone carving classes where you get to make your own jewelry. We decided to go for it and on Sunday morning, that's what we did.

Working out of his home, our instructor Stephen is an immigrant from Germany who fell in love with both the medium of bone and Maori culture. He walked us through the entire process of making our necklaces, which took about 5 hours.

We began with sketches. Some of us were better at drawing our designs than others, but everyone at least had a vision for what we wanted to do. We then had to transfer our original sketch onto a piece of bone. Then the process of cutting, smoothing, sanding, and polishing all happened multiple times until you have a beautiful piece of jewelry. Our designs were simple enough so that we did at least 80% of the work ourselves, with Stephan helping us start a particular process and then having us finish it. I never thought I could make something so beautiful that I'm proud and excited to wear everyday. It was also cool to see how different everyone's designs were and how they each included a bit of Maori culture (except David's. Maori didn't really have a use for the treble clef).