Birch Bark and Spruce Root Harvest

Late Summer Greetings to you, Kind Readers! I've recently become interested in Native American basketry, some fine examples of which are crafted from finely woven spruce root fiber by some of the tribes of the Pacific Northwest Coast. Below (center, front) is a spruce root basket, possibly of Tlingit Indian manufacture, from around the turn of the century:



Here in the Northeast, forms of spruce root basketry may also be found, but the abundance of the Birch tree facilitated the construction of a wide variety of vessels from that tough but uniquely paper-like bark. Accordingly, I developed a strong desire to try my hand at harvesting and utilizing examples of both materials.

A journey to the shores of the great Lake St. Catherine in Vermont has been in the works for some time, and I determined that the prospects for my harvest should be agreeably met in that region, and I was not disappointed. The Birch trees seem to thrive on the periphery of areas that have been cleared for the purposes of quarrying slate; there are several such areas in the region. While it is possible to harvest bark from a live Birch tree without killing the tree, there was no shortage of fallen Birches upon which the bark remained as clean and viable as on any living specimen, and so I harvested as much as I pleased from those, and later determined that, for the sake of comparison, I would be remiss for failing to judiciously extract a harmless quantity from a few live trees as well.

The method for harvesting from a tree in either state is the same: a sharp utensil is drawn around the circumference of the trunk, cutting deeply enough to enable the release of a sufficient thickness of the papery outer bark while avoiding (on a live specimen, that is) cutting so deeply as to damage the inner layers of living bark. If a two-foot wide section of bark is desired, then a second cut is made in the same manner two feet from and parallel to the original. Finally, one straight line is cut connecting the two circular cuts. If these cuts are made in the spring while the live tree's sap is "flowing" apparently the bark sheet will fairly "pop" right off the trunk. At other times, the bark holds on a bit more snugly, though careful peeling will generally result in a more or less intact sheet. On a dead tree, the bark strip will generally release from the trunk with great ease and an intact sheet is procured with little exertion. In the photo below I am releasing a segment from a dead Birch; the dark red layer is a film of decomposing trunk matter that is easily peeled away in a neat layer revealing the many layers of perfect, pinkish birch bark beneath:



For crafting purposes, nice flat sheets of bark are easiest to work with. Bark taken from a dead Birch tree will want to assume the shape of the trunk from which it was stripped, ie: round, while bark taken from a live tree will, very soon after harvest, curl up very tightly indeed. I attempted to thwart both situations by weighting stacks of the bark in a shallow part of the lake to soak and soften for a few days. I then stacked them neatly on the dock and covered them with flat pieces of slate which I further weighted with stones until the sheets were more or less dry. This worked very well with the bark taken from dead trees, while the bark taken from the live trees, having not dried sufficiently during the pressing, curled right back up during the journey back to Providence. I have read that soaking the rolls in hot water for a period will allow the bark to relax sufficiently to be worked with. Below are some images of the bark sheets being stacked and pressed, and an image of a nicely trimmed, dry, and more or less flat stack of useable bark!







Next, a suitable stand of Spruce trees (Black Spruce, in this case) was located, and the topsoil scuffed up a bit revealing the long, thin roots that run parallel to the surface of the ground. In this particular operation I will not claim to be anything other than a novice, and educated myself prior by studying Judy Kavanagh's excellent tutorial. I will not attempt to rewrite something that she has done so well, but simply add my own notes and experiences in case someone might find them useful. In short time, several sufficiently long-ish roots were teased from the ground. I was quite unsure how this project would play out, and so erred on the side of gathering too few, rather than amassing an unwieldy cache that I was unable or unwilling to process completely.



I washed the dirt off my little bundle of roots and, following this separate account of the steps by which spruce roots are prepared for basket weaving by the Tlingit Indians, roasted the roots briefly over a small fire to char the root bark. The root bark is quite a bit thicker than I had thought, however, and as I commenced to pull the roots through a notched piece of wood to pull the bark off (pictured below), found that the surface of the root bark had been but lightly charred, and some effort was still required to strip off the rest, though I do think the heating loosened the bark a bit and made the stripping easier.



Because the root bark was thicker than I had anticipated, some of the roots that I had thought might be too thick were actually perfectly sized once stripped, and some of the roots that looked fine right out of the ground, ended up being too thin and flimsy to use after the bark was stripped (and several of those broke in the process of stripping). Below is the same bundle pictured previously after the root bark was stripped:



The neat part about processing spruce roots is that they are not used whole, but rather split in half, then in quarters, so that a four foot strip of root, after splitting, yields 16 feet of spruce fiber! The roots split fairly easily, though it does take some concentration and skill to keep the split right down the middle. In the photo below, I have split the root in half, and am in the process of splitting one half again into two quarter strips. I think an accomplished basket maker may split these quarters down even further, but that greatly surpasses my skills, and I was happy with my bundle of quartered spruce root strips!.





My strips are a bit lumpy and uneven looking, and I cant imagine working them into a basket, but I do think they will make excellent binding material for birch bark containers! You will have noticed by clicking on Judy's link that her tutorial on spruce roots is part of a larger tutorial on building a birch bark canoe; spruce roots are the traditional material used to bind together canoes! I certainly didn't harvest enough of either material to build a canoe, nor would I be competent or patient enough to assemble such a fine vessel even if I had, but the tutorial is very interesting, and I may like to try to build a miniature birch bark canoe at some point. Want to see what I did with some of that birch bark? Have a look at my blog post on birch bark boxes!

Funny Thrift Store Discovery: Wedgwood Lobster Bowl

Even when the pickings are slim at the local thrift shop, I can usually get a few good chuckles out of the array of silly things that turn up. Take this lobster bowl, for instance: At first glance I thought "Ha! Now theres something funny to see! A bowl in the form of a shell being supported by a lobster! A thing like that!" and so on...

Well, Anne was really quite taken with it from the get go, but I maintained that, curious though it was, it was destined to live on that thrift store shelf for a considerable time eliciting all manner of laughs and criticisms before anyone came along and deemed it worthy of purchase. Anne took a closer look under the base for hallmarks and such, and she found a few, and one that seemed to read "wedgwood". Well, that was just fine, says I, immediately assuming the role of Antiques Roadshow-style appraiser, asserting that such things as that were easy to fake, and that this piece probably came from the home goods department at TJ Maxx down the road.

That lobster bowl did work its way into my brain, though, and we talked about it and wondered about it all the way home, and when we got there, Anne made straight for the computer and set right to researching the thing. The Wedgwood Museum describes the bowl thusly:

"Towards the end of the 19th century, when the Victorian taste for all things extravagant and quirky, was at its height, Wedgwood introduced numerous items of novelty tableware. Salad bowls and servers in particular were eminently suitable vessels to be disguised with various flora and fauna. This example has the bowl itself balancing on lobster claws. It was patented in 1888 and manufactured in the same year. "

The identical bowl in the Wedgwood museum is described as a salad bowl and is pictured with serving utensils (below)



A catalog from a 2009 Christie's auction lists two identical bowls, without the serving utensils, as "Wedgwood Creamware Shell-Form Centerpiece Bowls". Wedgwood also manufactured the salad bowl below, from the collection of the Museum of Liverpool



Well, at any rate, by the time we found the information I've posted thus far, we were fairly well obsessed with that old lobster bowl, and when we saw that Christie's had auctioned off their identical pair for $3250.00 why we were just on fire for it! Problem was, the thrift shop had closed for the day. After all that research I changed my tune pretty quick and figured someone more savvy than us had probably snatched that thing up as soon as we set it down. We made a plan to be waiting for the doors to open the next morning in the event that it was still there, and had some information on what marks should be found on the bottom of the bowl written on a scrap of paper. I was just as happy as could be when I saw it was still perched up on its shelf! We examined the base and determined that all of the various markings were in order, and that this was the real deal before hauling it up to the register. The gal at the counter kind of wrinkled up her nose and gave us a funny look when she saw it, but we didn't mind a bit; we had our treasure! Following are a few more images of our lobster bowl:









The image above shows the various hallmarks and other information stamped and painted underneath the base. I've had a fine time arranging various groupings of shells, corals and sealife in our new Wedgwood bowl!



Thanks for joining me, and do have a lovely weekend!

Shaman Cap Makeover, Before and During

After familiarizing myself with the "lazy stitch" beading technique used on the medicine bag (covered in an earlier post) I determined that the Native American inspired "shaman's cap" (honestly, there isn't anything to distinguish this as a shamanic artifact-- it more closely resembles some examples of Apache warrior's caps, though I didn't know that at the time, and so dubbed it a shaman's cap and shall continue to refer to it as such) that I had made some 15 years ago might benefit from some lazy stitch beadwork to cover the seams where the sections of deerskin were stitched together. Upon closer inspection I determined that a number of elements comprising the cap were quite unacceptable by my current, more stringent, crafting standards, and set about deconstructing the artifact in preparation for some structural and aesthetic changes. Following are some images of the cap before any changes were made:







The hair drops evident above were among the details of the cap that troubled me: the locks of hair (mine, from when I had long hair) had been rather crudely "hot glued" into cones I had formed (very crudely) from heavy-gauge sheet tin and attached to the cap using unnecessarily thick wire, so that they didn't move or hang particularly gracefully, but poked out rather awkwardly. I have now completed most of the beadwork with the exception of the front strip, which I had finished in the black and white striped pattern like the others before deciding that I might prefer a wider strip of a different pattern. I have started the new front strip, but don't feel satisfied with the pattern or colors, so will probably try something different. I added some red deerskin trim accented with old cobalt blue glass trade beads attached with sinew, and a silver concho against a red antique blanket-wool circle to the front also. Here is the cap in its current state:









The image immediately above shows the new hair cone-drops. I loosened the hair from the old tin cones by gently heating them until the old hot-glue became liquid enough to allow the hair cluster to be pulled out. I was then able to pull off all of the excess hot-glue so that the mass of each hair cluster base was greatly reduced, allowing it to fit into new, thinner store bought jingle cones. Before using the new cones, however, I gave them a quick dip in a metal darkening patina solution to give them a nicely aged appearance. I set each hair cluster into its cone this time with a touch of heated pinon resin after first securing a strip of sinew to the hair cluster and passing it up through the tip of each cone to attach to the cap, which should allow the drops to move more naturally than the thick wire I had used for attachment previously. I also added 3 antique green glass trade beads (in additional to the original abalone disks) to each drop. In the photo you will also notice a thick cluster of horsehair; I had dyed one quarter of the hair red, and was considering using the white and red dyed horsehair instead of the brown human hair in the drops-- I may still do a horsehair version and see which one I like better. The original crown feathers were in pretty poor condition after having suffered a great many surprise cat attacks. They were wrapped in antique red blanket wool and wire, then attached with wire to the crown. I will probably add some new feathers and wrap them differently, and attach them all to the crown with sinew, though I haven't yet started on that part of the reconstruction. I Thank You for joining me for this segment of the "shaman's cap makeover" and hope to have a completed project post up for you before long!

Happy Independence Day!

When Anne and I lived in Chicago and embarked on the occasional little journeys out of the city, we often stopped at the big fireworks markets in Indiana to poke around and hunt for fun novelty fireworks. While fireworks are certainly fun to ignite, we really enjoy the delightful colors and designs of the fireworks themselves (like colorful little presents, exquisitely wrapped!) and have held on to some of our favorites! Above are a few photographs I took of novelty fireworks we have collected... I hope you enjoy them! If you'd like to look at some more fun vintage fireworks images, visit here and here (you Brits have some great vintage fireworks sites!)

Below is a wonderful screenprint entitled "Celebration" that I first saw with my sister while visiting the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria, Virginia. Made by Clay Huffman in 1991, it is a very complex screenprint comprised of 31 different ink colors; I was quite captivated by the subject matter, vibrant colors, and technical excellence of the print! A few years later, my mom and sister went back to the Torpedo Factory and bought me one of the prints (print #85 of an edition of 190) and surprised me with it on my birthday! I haven't had it displayed in a few years, and went into quite a panic this morning when it wasn't where I thought I had packed it; I found it, however, and am pleased that it looks just as colorful, dynamic and fun as I remembered it! I hope you all have safe and fun celebrations of your own on this Independence Day!!!

Medicine Bag Makeover

The ceaseless drizzle and pall of grey clouds that has descended upon New England and refuses to lift has taken its toll on my spirits of late, kind reader. Though I have been mostly house bound, and thus surrounded by craft materials and dozens of worthy projects, somehow all of these things fail to inspire, mired as we have been in all of this damp gloom. What to do, then? Well, I have been enjoying perusing the online collections of the National Museum of the American Indian and Harvard's Peabody Museum of Anthropology, and was inspired to dust off my beading supplies and small sack of loose dentalium shells and engage in a bit of Native American style craft work.

Following is an image of a small buckskin medicine bag that has been in my possession for some twenty years and has acquired quite an aged patina.



Many years ago I adorned it with a cowrie shell, and a strip of beadwork that I had done on a loom and (gasp!) glued onto the front of the bag. It didn't take long for the beadwork to fall off, leaving ugly patches of glue behind. This morning I decided it was high time to try out a beading technique I hadn't tried before: the so-called "lazy stitch", so as to cover the scars left over from the earlier adornment, and add a touch authentic Native American flair. The lazy stitch is a classic method for applying beads to leather; beads are stitched right onto the surface in tidy rows that may comprise a simple decorative strip or encompass a decorative expanse of beadwork on a vest, saddle bag, pair of leggings or the like. In learning the stitch, which is not difficult but does require some patience and an adherence to time tested techniques, I referred to Steve Nimerfro's guide entitled "Sioux Style Lazy Stitch Beadwork" published online by craft retailer Matoska Trading Company. I started by drawing a grid to represent the bead strip and then decided on a pattern, filling in the squares on the grid according to the bead colors I had chosen to use. Then I just translated the pattern I made up on the grid into actual beads, row by row, and stitched them on according to the instructions! I like the way it turned out-- not too bad for my first try!



I have a few more items I am eager to do lazy stitch on, most notably a buckskin shaman's cap I made about fifteen years ago that will benefit from strips of beadwork to cover the seams where the leather is sewn together. I will definitely post photos when I begin that project! I have a few other medicine bags that could use a little sprucing up... perhaps I should start a new FinderMaker segment called "Pimp My Medicine Bag" and invite readers to send in before and after photos of their medicine bag creations and alterations!

My second project, completed just last night, was inspired by this old necklace in the Peabody Museum's collection made by a member of the Karuk tribe in California:



Dentalium shells come from a type of Mollusk, and were used as an early form of currency by many Native American tribes. They were commonly strung on natural fiber thread and traded by the strand for goods or services. Strands were also bundled together and worn both as decoration and an outward symbol of wealth. I had a bag of small dentalium shells I had ordered online without any particular project in mind, and was delighted to finally be inspired to put them to use!



The shells are naturally hollow, but the pointed end is quite narrow, and needs to be nipped off so that a waxed thread may be passed through; they also tended to have bits of gravel lodged within, so it was necessary to run each one through with a stiff wire to clear the gravel before stringing. I was able to get seven strands from my one ounce bag ($3.50) which I then attached to a seven inch strip of rolled buckskin that would rest against the back of the neck (as the little pointy shells would be fairly uncomfortable against bare skin). This is how it turned out:





I really am quite thankful to all of the fellow FinderMakers who follow my blog. Knowing that there are folks out there who share my interest in finding and making things encourages me to stay active. Thanks so much for joining me here... I have so many projects to work on, and I look forward to sharing them with all of you!!!

Back From The Land of Enchantment

Greetings, readers! I'm just back from a most enchanting stay in the Land of Enchantment... New Mexico! It was a wonderful week, full of adventure and exploration, and although I'm on a strict budget, I brought back some neat items, costing little or nothing, that I had been hoping to find.

Although much of the land there is quite arid, wherever there is water, there will be giant, majestic Cottonwood trees. They are called "Paako" (meaning "water wood") by the Hopi Indians on account of their ability to seek out and find water. The Hopi use the roots of the cottonwood tree to make "Kachinas", intricately carved and decorated representations of benevolent Hopi spirit helpers that are given to children as teaching tools. While Kachinas are still an integral part of the Hopi way of life, the beauty and artistry of the carved figures did not escape the eye of outsiders, and eventually Hopi artisans began carving Kachinas to sell in the tourist markets. Today, finely carved Kachinas worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars are sought out by avid collectors, and more simply crafted Kachinas are carried all over the world by visitors to New Mexico and Arizona eager to take with them a beautiful and meaningful reminder of the spirit of the southwest.

Having grown up largely in Arizona and New Mexico, I've been familiar with Kachinas for years, but rather than buying one from a curio shop, I thought it might be a fun and informative experience to try to carve my own. I am grateful to my brother-in-law for conveying his knowledge of the craft (which is considerable!) and to my nephew, who guided me through a grand forest of Cottonwoods towards some that had fallen, allowing access to the sacred roots from which traditional Kachinas are carved. I hope to keep readers apprised of my progress when I begin the project, but first I will do some more research and decide what figure I should like to depict! As Ive done in earlier posts, I would like to direct anyone interested in Kachinas and Hopi culture towards another website, rather than clutter up the Internet with redundant and possibly incomplete information.... the Guide to Hopi Kachina Dolls does a far better job of explaining Kachinas than I could hope to do here.

Pictured at the top of this post are two of the four Cottonwood roots I carried back to Providence with me. I was also very happy to be able to gather up a nice ball of sticky, fragrant resin from some Piñon pine trees in Taos that I will likely use as a natural adhesive or varnish in some project or other. One of my favorite ways to evoke the spirit of New Mexico here on the east coast is to light a log of Piñon wood incense from Incienso de Santa Fe. The aroma of burning Piñon and Cedar woods wafting on a crisp, cool breeze through an ancient pueblo is something anyone can experience by picking up a box of this incense!

When traveling from Santa Fe to Taos (something anyone visiting the Land of Enchantment is apt to do) a worthwhile diversion may be had by exiting the highway and making ones way along a scenic, winding road towards the small village of Chimayo. Here, nestled within a valley in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, you will find New Mexico's most visited chapel, the Santuario de Nuestro Señor de Esquipulas, commonly called the Santuario de Chimayo. The current chapel was built in 1816 to house a miraculous crucifix that was found when a Chimayo Friar performing penances noticed a burst of light issuing forth from a nearby hillside. The friar began digging where he had seen the flash, and uncovered the crucifix which, although it was removed and taken to another chapel in the village of Santa Cruz 3 times, miraculously reappeared in the original hole in Chimayo each time. Today, thousands of people make pilgrimages to the chapel to view the crucifix and kneel and scoop dirt that is believed to have curative powers from the original hole in which that crucifix was found. I was among those thousands, and feel honored to have had the opportunity to collect and bring home a sample of this much revered dirt. Following are a few pictures from the Santuario:


Exterior of Chapel

Hole in which the miraculous crucifix was found, and from which pilgrims may take a scoop of alleged curative dirt.

Picturesque Chimayo.

Finally... worthwhile southwestern souvenirs need not be expensive; This fun image was printed on a paper bag from a gift shop. Cut out and framed, I think it would make a very fetching decorative print!

A Mossy Terrarium

The woodlands of New England are delightful in the spring! A recent trek through Rhode Island's Snake Den Park yielded no snakes but plentiful moss... I couldn't resist collecting a very modest sampling of little mosses to bring back to the workshop and install within an old glass laboratory culture flask. I hadn't ever tried to grow anything in a terrarium, so I did a bit of research and ended up committing to the following installation procedure as outlined by Willi Galloway of eHow:

Step 1
Use a moisture-retentive, poor potting mix for the moss. Moss need high moisture levels and also require a poor, low-nutrient environment. To grow moss in a terrarium, mix one part regular potting mix with one part sand and one part clay.

Step 2
Fill the bottom of the terrarium with 1 inch of the potting mix. Moss has a very narrow root system because it typically grows on rocks and wood.

Step 3
Plant the moss in the terrarium. Add a few rocks and pieces of wood for decoration. In addition to being decorative, the rocks and wood increase the humidity inside the terrarium. Eventually, the moss will grow to cover the wood and rocks.

Step 4
Place a lid on the terrarium. Keep the lid on at all times. It should only be removed to water the moss.

Step 5
Keep the moss consistently moist. There must not be standing water in the terrarium, but moss grows best when the potting mix stays moist. Water by misting the moss several times a week. If the potting mix is getting dry in between waterings, increase your misting frequency.

Step 6
Put the terrarium in bright but indirect sunlight. Outside, moss needs a shaded area. Inside, moss grows best in bright light. However, direct sunlight causes the temperature inside the terrarium to be too high, so place the terrarium behind a transparent curtain or at least several feet away from a bright window.

Step 7
Be patient. Moss grows slowly. It will eventually grow to fill the terrarium, but this may take a year or more.

I deviated from the instructions only in my choice of soil: I had scooped up some soil from around where the moss was growing, as I thought my moss might feel comfortable growing on the same substrate it occupied in the forest, though I worked it through a mesh sieve before funneling it into the flask to filter out the larger leaves and pine needles. All of the mosses plumped up and became very green indeed within a few hours of the transplant-- I do hope things continue to thrive!



There is a little glass snail in there by glass artist Beth Lipman. I also added some turquoise crushed glass, but sort of wish I hadn't-- I think I preferred it being all green! Anyway... should you like to have some colored, crushed glass on hand I do recommend American Specialty Glass, as I have used them often and find that they have a very good selection.

If you are interested in terrariums at all, you must have a look at some created by Manhattan artist Paula Hayes. Here are a few photos... definitely go to her site for more!





It just occurs to me that Paula's terrariums aren't capped up as the instructions I followed said to do... I do think more research is in order, and I am reluctant to cap up my terrarium now... It makes more sense to me to leave it open so there is some exchange of air, as the forest from whence the mosses originated was certainly very airy!