Packing up the stone

Last week on Tuesday we met Piero. Piero is a magician. On Friday he made all of our stone disappear into 4 wooden crates. I thought I knew how to pack things well. Spending a half-day with Piero loading up the crates was an opportunity to work with someone with exceptional spatial abilities. It also helps that he can operate a forklift and use two single straps a multitude of ways to lift, turn, flip and slip stone into tight spots.

He came to look at the various stone we’ve collected over the 3 weeks and with a tape measurer and an exclamation of “Mama mia” we worked out a plan. Mostly in his head, as I only saw him write down the measurements of four stones. With the help of Lotte, one of the resident sculptors here, we arranged to have crates built to ship our stone home. The crates have to be built out of special wood that is stamped and certified so we don’t import any bugs in the wood.

It was a surprise when we arrived to the studio Friday morning to see 5 empty crates already delivered. Piero came after lunch and started to load the stone, Tamara recorded all the stone and where they went, Eirene took photos of each one (we need to supply a complete record of everything we’re exporting and importing to get us out of Italy and into the US). And no, sadly we cannot fill the spaces with wine and olive oil although we did really want to.

On Monday Piero will return to fill the final crate with our sculpture. This one is packed a bit more carefully. We’ve not finished anything too far and this is one of the reasons why. All of the in-process sculpture will go in the fifth crate. We still get a few days to sculpt on some small pieces before we leave at the end of this week (how did time go this quickly?). At the end of the week, we’ll put them in the last crate before it’s closed up.

We’ve been working with our shipping agent in the US and his counterpart in Italy who has responded graciously to my many questions with patience after noting, “your first time buying stone in Italy to take home?”. “Si, but hopefully not my last,” I replied.

This week we will spend a little less time sculpting and more time recording all the stone and their dimensions and types. Then we’ll get the final dimensions of the crates and the weights, sign off on the shipping documents, and arrange for a truck to come and pick it up to take it to the outgoing Port. We won’t see our sculptures again for about 6 weeks when they arrive in Seattle and we truck our crates to Whidbey Island to unpack them.

As exciting as this part is, it’s also real reminder that our time here is coming swiftly to an end. We have a few more days to enjoy stone dust and our new stone sculpting family at Studio Pescarella, so we will focus on that instead.

More soon, ciao!