Stone isn't like stone...

Halfway through our workshop and Cosmas tackled a challenge that Corentin had brought him: Try to work with the local stone from our corner of Burgundy! It's a limestone that varies in hardness and is very friable. It chips and splitners and often contains not only fossils but also veins where the stone is harder. Cosy hammered and banged away at the stone Corentin had brought using Corentin's tools because those for Serpentine we use, are not hard enough for limestone. By the end of the day he had a few blisters and was muttering at the intractable piece of rock but chip by chip, splinter by splinter a very Burgundian motif had emerged from the yellow-reddish stone: a bunch of grapes.

Meanwhile, with some of us absent on other errands or nursing minor strains, we progressed to rasping and sand papering and the stones started to show some of their colour.