Back to the Stone Age: Bone Carving and Caving

Choosing our Maori designs

First things first, we need to choose a template design and sketch it onto a piece of cow bone. Although there are many great designs to choose from, we can modify them in anyway. As it is traditional in the Maori culture to gift necklaces (or, at least this is true for pounamu, we’re not sure on bones), we are making a bone carved necklace for each other. This could be disgustingly cute or it could go horribly wrong. We ain’t no artists!

The ground rules

The rules are, we choose the template we want the other person to carve. Of course, the other person has to do a wicked carving and not screw it up!

Twists, hooks and hidden meanings

So Laura goes for a design of a double twist, meaning “Bonding, long lasting friendship and the bondage of two people in love” (Lame!), mixed with a hook meaning “Strength and determination, abundance and prosperity, and safe journey over water”.

Robin goes for a no-nonsense hook.

Then, Robin gets a creative spark and starts designing some subtle carvings for inside the necklace. A line and few dots for Laura’s necklace. And as Laura should have suspected, Robin then makes some carving requests for his necklace. He wants a koru (spiral) in the middle of the hook meaning “peace”.

Karen’s little helpers hard at work

Creating our masterpieces

Now that designs have been established, Karen gets us started by drilling holes in the intricate parts of the designs we would screw up, then gets us on a sanding machine to get rid of the excess bone. From there, we move to another machine to carve some smoother edges around our design. Once that’s satisfactory, we use a pen-like tool to smooth the edges.

Along the way, we are all comparing our progress with the Stray passengers and have a bit of a banter with Karen. The dogs also occupy our time with their ball games!

The end result

Three hours later, we carve our final modifications. (Robin pushing Laura out of the way when he sees the koru she is carving is not curved enough). Karen polishes up the carving and BOOM! We have ourselves some professional-looking necklaces here! They actually look really good – they’re something we can happily gift to each other.

As much as we like to congratulate ourselves, Karen did an awesome job of keeping us on track. But now, we need to get ourselves back on track to explore the Punakaiki Cavern today, so we say goodbye to Karen and the dogs, and hit the road.