On to the Next Project-A New Walking Stick Project-Photos

Natural inclusions almost create a face.

At the beginning of the year I blogged about my goals for the year.  I blogged that my main goals for the year were to make a carousel and another walking stick.  Regular readers know that I recently completed the carousel.  After a small digression into painted boxes, I am ready to begin on the walking stick. Although I have more walking sticks than I need, I just enjoy making them. 

Insect damage and dark spots add to the design.

Many of my readers come to this blog either by finding pictures of my sticks in Google images or by doing an internet search on how to make walking sticks.  The posts on walking sticks are some of my most regularly viewed posts.  I hope my readers will enjoy following along while a try to turn this stick into a work of art.  If it comes out well, I think it is going to be something special.

This walking stick is a very old stick and has a bit of a history to it.  It has been with us for at least twenty-five years waiting for something to be done with it.  The reason it has been around for so long is that it has some natural inclusions that one can imagine as some sort of animal face.  (In some ways it reminds me of Grumpy Cat from the Cheezburger website http://icanhas.cheezburger.com/lolcats/tag/grumpycat)  The trouble is that it is almost an animal face, but not quite a face.  The execution of turning it into a face is the challenge. 

The sat around for years waiting for my husband to figure out how to transform it into an animal head staff.  The inspiration just would not come.  Then the stick did a stint as a bat for playing stick ball in the back yard when we played with our kids.  (Stick ball is rather like playing field hockey, but with a soccer ball.)  Eventually my husband passed the stick on to me.  I stared at it for years as well, waiting for the idea that would help me turn this into an animal face.  It is one of those sticks that is so nice on its own that you don't want to ruin it by doing something that does not come out well.  So it sat around for more years.  Finally I realized, "Think something else."  Once I did, ideas started to fall into place.

I started thinking in terms of the stick being old, and having history.  Then my thoughts wandered into how history was transmitted in ancient cultures by oral history stories, hieroglyphics, pictographs, and dance.  This was the starting point for the plans for this walking stick. 

When my husband and I were in Oahu, Hawaii a few years ago we spent a day at the Polynesian Cultural Center.  (If you ever go to Oahu, this place should definitely be on your list of things to see. It was a really interesting place.)  Each of the Polynesian cultures had their own area in which they taught about the history and culture of that particular group and also how that culture adapted to the Hawaiian islands.  Before writing, some of their history was told through memorization, symbols, and dance movement.  I'm hoping to incorporate some of what I learned there about how they transmitted history into this walking stick in order to tell a story.

The story won't be about Polynesian culture, but will tell the story of how a culture evolved, survived, and came to be personified by a shaman.  I plan to have a written,
wood-burned  story line that spirals around the staff.  The rest of the staff will be decorated with glyphs resembling tribal pictographs.  Some areas may be left bare to show the trails of insect damage that the wood sustained while living.  That will add to the impression that this is an ancient artifact passed down through generations.  The animal face will become some sort of stylized face as one might see on a totem pole in the Pacific Northwest. 

This is a tall order.  As usual at the beginning of a project, I am feeling I've taken on something more than I can pull off successfully.  However, I know that once I get into it and break it down into small parts and get going that I will be okay.  Step One is to get the story line down.  Not only do I have to have a story line, but it also has to fit while spiraling around the stick and end where I need it to end, preferably close to the bottom of the stick.  I already have a few ideas, but nothing down on paper yet.

This project will take a while.  I'll be blogging about the progress of the walking stick, but may from time to time show some pictures of other things I am working on.  I find that taking a small break from time to time to experiment with something helps to keep me from growing bored on a long project.  Also, this project is going to be somewhat weather dependent because I'll be doing the wood burning on the outside work bench.  The smell of charred wood tends to leave an unpleasant odor in the house.