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From the studio
Reading the grain of a polished slab
Wetting a stone to see what is inside it before committing.
Before anything else, you find out what the stone is going to let you do.
A slab wetted down or taken to a first polish shows its grain, its banding, and every flaw it has been hiding. Honeycomb calcite in particular goes from a dull block to something lit from inside, and the pattern you can see at that moment is the pattern you are going to be working with — or against — for the rest of the piece.
This is where a sail gets decided. Which way the banding runs sets which way the curve has to go, because a sail cut across the grain reads wrong even if the shape is right.
Some of it is reading, and some of it is just holding the thing up to the light and looking for a long time.