An Early Project Related to My Walking Sticks

Wand from Poplar wood.

Bark feathered at the knot and wire covering a crack

 

A holiday weekend is coming up.  Labor Day weekend is one of those days we spend with family and friends and I have been busy getting ready for entertaining.  In my last blog post I had mentioned that I had a stick project that used runes and that I would show it at some point.  I guess the time for that is now, because I am so busy that I won't be able to start wood burning on the stick until after the holiday.  Although it is a wand rather than a walking stick, there are some valuable lessons to be learned from it that are also useful in making walking sticks.

I needed a wand as a prop for a public costume event.  Those of you that know me know that I go into overdrive when it comes to costumes.  A plain stick just would not do.  At the time that I made this wand I had not yet started to make walking sticks.  The lessons I learned from this stick saved me from making a big mistake when I did start to make walking sticks.  It also taught me a few ways to handle things when sticks go wrong. 

When I made this wand, I needed the piece for an event the next day.  (It seems that I am always working up to the last minute on costumes.)  Anyway, I needed a stick, so I went out to the back yard and picked up a stick that had dropped from a Poplar tree.  I stripped the bark off the stick as well as I could.  When I reached the knot towards the end of the stick, the bark was stuck to the branch and no amount of scraping was getting it to come off.  I suppose power tools could have overcome this problem, but I did not have a lot of time.  I learned that when something like this happens, make it a feature.  Feather the bark down as well as you can at a transitional spot and make it look like that was the plan all along.

Next I marked on the runes, which were then carved in with the engraving bit of my Dremel tool.  About half way through the process, the stick started to crack along the length of the stick in two places.  This was the biggest lesson that I learned from this project.  You can't just pick up a stick and get to work on it.  If you strip them when they are completely fresh they crack.  Sticks have to be seasoned before you start working on them.  I have given some detailed information on seasoning sticks in some of my previous blog posts on walking sticks, so I won't go into a lot of detail here.  I invite readers to search my blog's archive section for other posts on walking sticks.

Anyway, so there I was, half way through the project and the thing is developing a crack in the middle and at then end of the stick.  I realized what the problem was, but this was the stick I had and there was no time to look for what I needed, so I just had to deal with the issues.  I finished carving the runes in and painted them red.  Then I carved a well into the tip and glued in a quartz crystal.  It looked unfinished just sitting in there.  It definitely needed something and I also had to deal with the unsightly cracks.  I decided that I would cover the cracks and the area where the crystal was joined to the stick with something to cover the defects.  Of the materials that I had on hand, it came down to ribbon (too fru-fru for what I was portraying), twine (the twine I had was too bulky for the project), leather strips (stiff and no time to condition them), or copper wire (at least I had enough of it).  I covered each of the areas with the copper wire using epoxy to glue it in place.  It looked like a somewhat unusual decorative element.  If I had more time I might have inlaid some of the wire in fairly intricate designs to help tie the themes together.  But sometimes with costume props, you go with what you can do in the time you have.

So, the main thing I learned from this project is don't use a fresh stick. The other lesson I learned was that when a crack happens it is not the end of the world. A little wood glue and some decorative elements can save something that you might otherwise have thrown out.  As the saying goes, consider mistakes to be "design opportunities".