Hand Carved Opals, or, How I spent my lock down time, Part -1.

When everything slowed to a crawl and anime conventions across the country shut down,what is a prop maker supposed to do? Buy some rough opal, that's what! The carving, or sanding of rough opals is possible by hand and I have a worn through whetstone to show for it. All of the opals on this rotating table were hand carved, without the aid of powered machines, using whetstones, sandpaper, with some scrap leather and cerium oxide used for polishing. There were a few exceptions, four or five of the stones were oddly shaped and thus required the use of a Dremel to sand and polish "free form" stones.
The pennies were placed on the rotating table to show relative size of the opals and also to show where the best focus is (a horizontal band from left to right about half way up the screen). The opals in the foreground and background as the table is rotating go out of focus.