One of the fun things about attending the CHA shows is the opportunity to see the crafts that don’t cross our paths everyday. Visiting Sierra Hills Stone gave me the opportunity to see soapstone carving in progress!
Sierra Hills Stone offers instructional kits in several different designs with everything you need to make a small carving. Most of the designs are animal figures.
This charm carving kit could appeal to both carving enthusiasts and bead makers, and is a small project for beginners to take on. It’s just one of several instructional kits that the company offers, and packages of additional bead carving blanks are also available.
Sierra Hills Stone also sells soapstone blocks for carvers who want to engage in projects of their own design, instead of using a kit.
Artist Ro Rivas was in the Sierra Hills Stone booth carving a prototype for future carving kit. This is definitely not a sit-on-the-couch-with-the-family type of craft! It is messy!
When the small carving is finished, it will look like this larger one that was on display in the company’s booth:
There were lots of other great samples on display in the company’s booth, including before and after examples of some of their instructional kits, along with some of their books.
What a lovely art form…have any Craft Critique readers tried it? We’d love to hear your thoughts on it!
While it is beautiful, as a card maker it holds no interest for me. I hope Craft Critique goes back towards paper crafting more.
There will be plenty of paper crafting coming, I promise!
Lovely work and images…the stone coloring is beautiful. TFS
Inspires to create these color combos in my card making!
This is a really interesting product! Thank you for highlighting it. While my main art form/crafting is card making, I have sculpted from clay and love it, too. Even if I don’t use the soapstone product, I have two relatives that make jewelry and I can always pass the idea along to them, too. To me, any kind of art can inspire me in my own medium.
Thank you for the glimpse of this craft. I have never tried sculpting, but love the feel of anything created from soapstone–so smooth and heavy. This is really a special skill.
I would love to try this! I saw soapstone carving kits were being carried briefly at Hobby Lobby, but when I went back to buy one they were gone! I hope they’ll bring them back.
This looks very interesting! And while I’m primairly a papercrafter- I’ll still try to make anything, at least once! And how cool would a hand-carved charm look, on a mini-album?!
Thanks for posting this- I’ve not seen or heard of these kits, before.
-kory k