I don't know if I'll be making too many more Dorodangos, or "shiny mud dumplings," but I'll be trying an idea out, just to see what might happen. The thing is, with something with a name like shiny mud dumpling that you can actually make, you must make at least one, just to see what a dang shiny mud dumpling looks like. I'll have to say, it's pretty shiny. Again, who'd have thunk it?
There's a good many people who are into these things, myself included. People sell them online and other people buy them. There are several kits you can buy, mostly from Japan, where it originated, and all you have to do is add water. The kits come with clay/soil, sand and something to burnish/polish it with, and often various colorants.
They all look nice, but I want things to be as natural as possible. Not that a Dorodango would be a natural thing...Nature creates spheres out of everything, but I can't see how a sphere could make itself out of mud, separate itself and then polish itself, but you never know.
Since it's not really a natural thing to begin with, the sky's the limit. I'll be trying to make something that wouldn't happen naturally, but at least I won't be using dyes or whatever; I'll be using rock.
I first thought it'd be cool to use powered opal for the final coatings if I could find any, and I found some on eBay. I love eBay. They offer powdered milky opal. Using it instead of sand for the last coats won't make it look like a natural opal but it should give a nice luster, almost like a glaze. It's hard to know if much of the iridescent color will be evident but we'll see.
What's interesting about the various sizes they grind the rock to is that the color gets harder to see as it gets finer. With the garnet, the 3-5mm pieces look red like garnet but it looks like gray beach sand when ground to a powder. It's the same with the opal.
This stuff comes from India so it'll take up to a month to get here and it's not super cheap, but I have to try it. I'm looking forward to trying the garnet more than the opal. I don't want to spend money and have them turn out plain gray, the color of the powdered garnet, because I can do that for free. Gray clay is free for the digging.
I'm hoping that when it's polished and burnished, the red color will come out more. Again, I think that the compression that happens with burnishing will be the ticket, but I could be wrong. Burnishing compresses the particles together to be more like a solid layer. If it sticks to itself well enough and I can get enough coats on it to give it depth, and grind the last coats into powder it should look okay.
In any case I discovered something interesting, with surprising results, and I managed to generate some interest in people who didn't know about it. These should look nice no matter what, but maybe they'll be close to what I hope they'll look like. We'll see. If they happen to turn out amazing, they also have powered jade, malachite, ruby, quartz, turquoise and many other stones in many different colors. I've been wanting to get my hands dirty again.
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