Tumbled Rocks: Batch #1

My first batch of tumbled rocks is finally finished! Here are a bunch of pictures of the rocks and some thoughts about my experience the first time around:

So, tumbling rocks is a lot less foolproof than it seems! A good number of rocks didn’t shine up as I’d hoped (too soft, too small, weird shapes, etc.), and it turns out some rocks can bruise (???) if you don’t cushion them enough, but the learning curve isn’t that steep, and some of these came out glorious regardless.

Here’s the finished product:


I also had the presence of mind to take initial photos of them before I put them in, so I have some nice progression pictures of the rocks. Here are the progression photos (over ~6 weeks), and rocks tagged with blue are ones I collected myself, and ones tagged with red are ones I bought:

There are rocks in here I collected from Utah, Wisconsin, Alaska, Michigan, Kenya, and Japan, so quite an international batch! Anyway, some more about specific rocks that I’m super proud of:

Here’s the one that started it all (below)...for whatever reason I had a feeling it would make a really good polishing stone, and I’ve been meaning to polish it for probably at least six or seven years. No idea where I found it or what it is. Whatever it is, it’s super hard and relatively translucent, but when you shine light through it, it’s orange inside and blue/purple on the edges.

Pretty sure this one below is a chunk of magnetite...it’s super heavy and magnets stick to it. It’s also got really cool shiny inclusions (specularite?). I collected it from a mine in the upper peninsula of Michigan.



Sorry for all the gifs but it’s super hard to show what these actually look like with static pictures. Check out the mirror shine on these agates I got from Lake Superior!


I collected this one from Lake Superior too, and it probably was one of the best glow-ups of all of the rocks...it’s incredibly colorful and has these weird starbursts of yellow and red.


These four are all ones I collected too...I think the upper right is some weird swirly rock from coastal Alaska and the pink granite is from Lake Superior. I have no idea where I found the bottom left, but it’s cold and shiny and has little purple and blue divots in it, along with what looks like pyrite (fool’s gold). The upper left is one I got from a little creek near my grandparents’ house in Michigan that I kind of thought might be a garnet, and I was right!!!


The garnet kind of shattered while it tumbled, but now I have all these little garnet bits:

I could go on forever, but here are the last couple I got good pictures of:


Something that looks like granite from Alaska that’s super orange/pink with these cool green inclusions, and a rock that wore down a ton (it’s in the first progression picture) that I found while doing a pay-to-dig excursion at a copper mine in Michigan.

I have another batch tumbling right now (I'll post a picture of the raw batch a bit later), so hopefully in four or five weeks, I’ll have some more to show y’all! I collected some of the rocks locally, so hopefully they’ll turn out nice. Now, what to do with all of these polished rocks...