After my return from teaching at a patchwork and quilting festival in Gramado, Brasil, last September, I posted about the experience including what I did on my free days there . Looking through some photos this morning reminded me that I should have followed up and posted more of the pics I took of things in the very impressive museum of rock samples and fossils that I enjoyed so much. Mike would have loved this museum, but because he’d been unwell and wasn’t able to travel as we’d planned, I was in Gramado on my own.

There were just a few people in the museum that morning, and one of the english-speaking docents accompanied me around the displays, and she was very interesting, eventually realising from my comments that some of those minerals were like old friends you might say, with which I’ve become very familiar during my long marriage to an exploration geologist with specialised interest in such things 🙂

The first collage includes a pretty fancy geode, and since the best amethysts do come from northern Uruguay up around Artigas on the border with Brasil in the far north west, it was possibly mined in Uruguay. The trilobytes are familiar to me too, but the others I don’t know, but I’d have photographed them because of their beauty. The group of colour tipped crystals looks floral, and the texture of the photo in the lower left corner looks somehow organic, rather like dead grass or a close up of kuba cloth?

This next photo is of some pretty impressive items in the gift shop – these are fabricated from very thin slices of rock collaged and assembled into sheets, which are lit from behind to enhance the striped rock. We don’t have room in our lounge or entry way, which is why I didn’t have one of the black and gold ones shipped back to Montevideo 🙂 I love them.