Ethiopian Opal Drying. The Slow And Careful Way... Successful! Amazing Welo Opal After Drying!!!

Hello ladies and gentlemen, so this will be the start of the drying process. I recently just cut this Ethiopian opal, I'll post a link in the top corner as per usual and maybe in the description if I remember, and we are going to try out a really slow drying process. Now in order to do that, basically what I'm gonna do is seal this inside a standard Ziploc bag and this is meant to hopefully slow Slow down the drying and possibly avoid... The stone from cracking, or crazing basically. So wish me luck, I'll track it in now and we'll record how it goes. As soon as I see something strange I'll let you know how long it took and yeah we'll we'll talk about any issues we come across and what we might do in the future to avoid it. If any of you in the comments can kind of give me some more suggestions and ideas I am more than willing to try out anything anything that pops up in the comments so And, yeah. Fingers crossed. Let's get into it. Okay, so here it is. T0. Beautiful colour. No cracks. No crazing. Bottom side. Slightly yellow. Beautiful rolling colour. Let's see how it goes, and keep an eye on it. Well, this is a week later. It wasn't really doing much in the bag for the first few days, but now, I've only just taken it out after a week, and it's started, this morning, going very white. So instead of being really clear, that was fading pretty quick and the color was coming back stronger. But now it's even gone white, almost to a Coober Pedy kind of white. I don't want to touch it too much because I don't want the oils from my fingers to affect it at all. But this is here on the top. You can see that it's still got a little bit of that yellowish amber glow to it, but it is slowly shifting to white and the color's becoming far more vibrant on it. I'll give it a quick little flick over the back. The backside is just like before but just brighter, still got that red and green playing across the face of it, really interesting. I'm wondering how white it's going to get, it's got some interesting pattern there. I think for now I'll keep it in the bag but I might open the bag up to atmosphere and just let it go. And then I'm probably going to chuck a desiccant inside the bag with it and see if I can speed up the process a bit. Because it's definitely very slow. I've seen time-lapses over the course of hours that have moved faster than putting it in the bag, so it's definitely a great way to slow it down if you're scared. But now I don't really want to slow it down anymore, I just want to see it really dry out. There's no cracks or anything that I can see, not even under a loop. So yeah, fingers crossed we keep it going. Okay now this has been out drying on the bench, not in the plastic bag now, for over a week. I'm still seeing absolutely no scratches. It is going a little bit whiter on, well, basically all around. It's still got a bit of an amber tinge to the to the actual stone and it's still got a lot of beautiful color in it. So it's coming along nicely. What I'm going to do now for the a couple weeks and then I can finally release this video is I've got here a pouch of desiccant. So I'm going to basically have a mini desiccator in a In a ziplock bag. And we'll see if we can really suck some moisture out of it. And yeah, after a few weeks, it should be fairly dry. I could also then go further and put it under a vacuum desiccator, which I do have as well. But we'll see if it needs anything like that. If there's no change in it after a little while in the desiccator bag, then I don't think I'm going to bother going all the way through and vacuuming, putting it in a vacuum chamber. But maybe out of interest, I'll do that at a later date anyway. So yeah it's a beautiful looking stone so far. I don't want to touch it too much just in case that affects it. I really like that pattern on the bottom. But yeah let's get it in the bag let's see if we can dry it even further. Alright ladies and gentlemen this is where we'll end this video. So I've had this now in a pouch of desiccant, well in a ziploc bag with desiccant in it, for quite a while and it doesn't seem to be changing much more anymore. So I think it's just about dry. I can't be 100% certain, but you can see it's definitely become this kind of... It's still got that tinge to it, that warm glow, but it has gone very much white in comparison to what it was, and the colour just kind of... It's all over the surface, it's very flashy. The back I like even more than the front. I've washed my hands to make sure there's no oil on them at all, but have a look at that. We've got some vibrant colours. And it just rolls all over the place, so quite an amazing, quite an amazing piece. It is still fairly see-through, so it's pretty crystalline stuff. It hasn't gone white Coober Pedy, not fully anyway, but look at that, it's just got that, still got an amazing foil effect. And yeah, beautiful, beautiful play. It's, it feels almost directional, but it's, yeah, it's Yeah, it's just very, it's a very strange colour play compared to a lot of Australian opal. It's very playful, but not very bright from one direction, like there's not one clear face in it. It's kind of shooting left, right and center, so a bit unusual compared to what I'm used to, but yeah, that's it. Dry with the desiccant. I could take it a little bit further with a vacuum desiccator, so basically suck the air and moisture out of it, but that's a little bit extreme and I don't really want to break up my first opal, so... I think we'll take it easy with this one and keep the experimentation to a minimum, and I'll have to carve another piece that I'm not so fond of, and then I'll start torturing it. This one, I think we'll get away with not being tortured, just because of all of that. So, yeah. That's it for this video and I'll see you in the next one where I might be working another one of these or I might be doing a bit more Aussie material. I really haven't decided. I've just gone into a seven day lockdown so I've got heaps of time on my hands and yeah I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to plan it but I'll work away and you'll see it when it comes up so see you then.