We don't really have soapstone here, but we do have serpentinite/greenstone. It's beautiful stuff, and I can carve it with flint, a pocket knife or a nail file.
It polishes up and gleams with veins of dark green or blood red.
Do you have photos of your carvings that you would share with us ? I'd love to see them. There's something incredibly tactile about soapstone carvings.
Some of the experimental archaeology stuff we did was to pound and burn the rubbery fat. It's rather weird, it needs a thin thin edge of flame, it needs care to keep it in good order…like a lamp wick does, or a candle wick so that it doesn't stutter and burns as cleanly as possible.
I don't know about the wick. We ended up using the inners from the loch rushes, the soft rushes used for basketry. I tried bog cotton, but it just flared up and burnt away like hair. In the end the best wick was just the edge of the fat itself.
The smell though, it permeated everything, and it clung for days afterwards.
Oily fish burn well too though, even if I did end up jittery on antihistamines
and fish oil burns cleaner than animal fat does. No idea why.
The cleanest fat we found to burn was the hard fat from around the kidneys, the suet…..thinking on it, we didn't try burning the cawl as a wick for that, and it might work
Anyway, suet melted down and soaked into rushes burns well, and stinks least of all of them that we tried. It still smokes really black though, especially if you don't give it enough oxygen.
M