A stone soft enough to shape with a woodworking rasp, sitting inside a firebox at eight hundred degrees. Finnish soapstone does both. The Finnish name is vuolukivi, literally carving stone. Most of it comes from Nunnanlahti in Juuka and from the Kainuu region, and Finland holds an estimated seventy per cent of Europe’s soapstone reserves. What makes the rock unusual is the mineral split. - Talc, roughly forty five per cent - Magnesite, roughly forty five per cent - Chlorite and oxides making up the remainder Talc is the softest mineral on the Mohs scale, a one. Its structure is a stack of silicate sheets held together only by weak van der Waals forces, so the layers shear past one another under a fingernail. That is why soapstone feels greasy and why a rasp bites into it like hardwood. Magnesite is the counterweight. At Mohs three and a half to four, the carbonate grains lock those talc plates into a dense, coherent mass. Brazilian and African carving stones can run seventy per cen...