Walking Stick Z- Part 5

A pattern from the tutorial

This is the same post as yesterday with some edits and spelling corrections.  It is funny that I can read over something once and not see the mistakes until after the article is posted.

Finally, I had a week where I actually feel like I'm getting back to a routine.  I made some progress this week on my projects.  I have been working on two different projects this week.  It feels great to get something done.

Drawn by dot method.

My major focus this week was the Walking Stick Z project.  I had  been going around in circles on that one for a while.  This week I had time to take out the palm sander and give the stick a final sanding.  I did not take out all the nicks and gouges that go along with stripping the bark, but I did sand the stick down enough that it is smooth enough that a pattern can be put on the stick.  It is ready to go.

Reduced size to fit walking stick

I spent most of the rest of the week working out a pattern.  Regular readers may remember that I was going through it trying to decide what to put on the stick.  I wanted dragons, but my dragon drawing ability just wasn't up to the task.  I suspect that once the dragon drawings were reduced in size they might have looked better than they did in a large scale but I just wasn't satisfied with them.  Next I tried to draw a stylized thistle.  I was trying to make something in a graphic that could easily be transferred to the stick.  Once again the results were less than what I wanted them to be.  It is one of those things that would have been just okay.  I finally decided to do some Celtic knot work.  And that is how I spent most of the rest of the week;
learning to draw a knot work pattern.

Strands linked together.

Because I am at some point hoping to sell some of my work, I want to make sure that all of my work is something I have done myself.  So that means that I had to learn to make the knots.  I had made one small project before, but it was so difficult to figure out I did not think I would ever use it again and did not save the pattern.  Several years later, I am back at square one.  I went through about five pages of graph paper front and back before I really started to "get it".  Lets just say that I need to work on my visualization techniques.  I guess that really is the key.  You have to have what the whole knot is going to look like before you start or else you are going to get lost in the process.

I started out using a book on how to make the knots:  Celtic Art The Methods of Construction by George Bain.  The book is still available on Amazon, but I have had this book since before the Internet was invented.  It has instruction for many types of knot work, but at times I found it a little hard to follow.  However, if you are really interested in learning how to do many different types of knot work, it is probably worth it to have own the book.

The good news is that there is plenty of information on the internet about how to create knot work.  I wanted to give a shout out to one website because I found it particularly interesting and helpful: www.clanbadge.com/tutorial
The website provide written instructions on how to create a knot and also had a Font for sale that could be used to create knot work on your computer.  For this project I followed the instructions for drawing a knot by hand because I want to learn how to do it, but I hope to get back to that website and experiment with the computer version at some point.  It is definitely going to improve turn around time on projects to create knots from the computer. The first photo shows the knot pattern I made using the tutorial from this web site.  This is the front side.  Once the pattern was drawn, I went over it with a marker so that I could distinguish the pattern lines from all the other lines used in creating the pattern and all of the lines that were mistakes.  They were still fairly visible even after having been erased.  I am not sure how well they will show up on the photos of the blog though.  The marker slightly bled through the paper enough that I could see it from the back, so once the entire pattern was drawn I turned the paper over and went over the back side with the marker so that I could just see the pattern without all of the other lines showing.  This pattern is too complex to use for my walking stick project however.  By the time I reduced the size to what would fit spiraling around the walking stick the lines were just too tight.  However, it looks as if it would make a great pattern to put on a painted box, so I'm holding on to it.

Another website was also helpful in helping me learn the dot method: http://gwydir.demon.co.uk/jo/knots/computer.htm
I think that I really began to understand the dot process once it was broken down in a step by step manner.  Before this, I just was not understanding what the book mentioned above was trying to show me.

Once I became familiar with the process, I started working on a knot pattern.  It is not perfect, but it is one I labored over for hours.  Sometimes it was a matter of working on a piece of it and then going back and saying "What is wrong with this picture?"  And finally I had something I could live with, although I suspect that people really familiar with the process could find all sorts of mistakes.  If you look closely at the photos you will see a number of erasures and false starts.  The photos are of the last pages I did, not the several pages that went into the trash.

Anyway, I finally had a bit of a pattern.  I reduced it to a size that would work well when transferred to the walking stick.  I made a number of copies of the pattern and glued them down on a sheet of paper to form strands.  I made copies of the strands and put them all on one sheet.  Then I made copies of the sheet so that I will have plenty of strands to use for the walking stick.  Now that I have my pattern, I am ready to start transferring the pattern and start the wood burning.  Well, actually, there is one more thing I have to do before I start wood burning.  I need to cut the stick down to its final height and round off the top end.  I will probably do that today. 

That is about how far I have been able to get this week.  Next blog post I should have some photos.  It will probably be on Thursday, but if it starts to rain it might be the following blog post.