Because My Life Doesn't Have Enough Noise: Rock Tumbling in Progress

 Originally, I just wanted to tumble some of the rocks that the kids and I collected on our Michigan adventure this summer. 

But then when I found the rock tumbler in the garage, I also found a neat little pile of rocks that I set next to it to tumble in some other, long-ago life. 

When did I do such a thing? What distracted me from finishing? 

Honestly, it could have been anytime in the past seven years, and anything from a global pandemic down to a cute cat walking up and asking for pets could have distracted me. Literally yesterday, while digging through my fabric bin searching for Halloween prints, I came across the flat sheet I bought to make bedroom curtains as a pandemic project. I had sewed the curtains for the bigger window, and then a squirrel ran by or I got hungry for a snack or something and I completely forgot about sewing the curtain for the smaller window... EVEN THOUGH I ALREADY HAD ALL THE MATERIALS!!!

So after I found the Halloween prints I was looking for, I sat down and finished sewing the sheet to the blackout fabric. It took maybe ten minutes, and that includes setting up the sewing machine and threading a bobbin. 

Now that that's done, back to rock tumbling!

Here, then, is the combination of Michigan rocks and previously collected rocks that I added to the tumbler barrel:

I added coarse grit and some plastic pellets, then set up the world's noisiest rock tumbler out in the garage:

Just... don't even try rock tumbling if you don't have a garage or basement or someplace VERY far away from the rest of humanity. It. Is. So. NOISY!!!

Here are my nice little rocks two weeks later!

And here they are rinsed off:

They look shinier than they are because they're still wet, but still, I'm very pleased with how much nicer they are already:

I had trouble getting all the grit rinsed out of every rocky little nook, so I put them back in the tumbler with a couple of squirts of dishwashing liquid and some more water--

I'll rinse them again tomorrow and start them with medium grit.

Now I should probably go do that Halloween sewing project before a kitten walks by and I'm distracted until next Halloween...