FinderMaker Recommended Reading

I really am indebted to my tillicum across the pond, Joff, for introducing me to Annie Dillard's The Living, an epic, historically based work of fiction following the lives of a group of early settlers on the Pacific Northwest coast during the late 1800's. It is easily the most engaging and well written story I have ever read; I wish I could have read it more slowly, or that the story could have just continued infinitely! Shortly after finishing it, I was perusing the online exhibits of the Whatcom Museum of History and Art (much of the story is set in the town of Whatcom, WA) when I ran across the photography of Darius Kinsey, who photographed logging operations and some other snippets of life in the Pacific Northwest around the time that the story is set. Viewing his photographs added a wonderful new dimension to the experience of reading The Living! Following are some of Mr. Kinsey's photos, courtesy of the Whatcom Museum and the University of Washington's digital photo collection:

Homestead on the Olympic Peninsula, WA, 1906 (UofW)

Cedar stump house, 1901 (UofW)

31 people posed inside of a giant cedar stump, 1902 (WM)

Loggers felling a fir tree, 1906 (UofW)

Two women pose outside of a hollowed cedar stump shack. (WM)

Cutting shingle bolts from a cedar log, 1902 (UofW)

Cedar trunk with a 20 foot diameter. (WM)

I've also greatly enjoyed reading The Lure of the Labrador Wild by Dillon Wallace, and his follow-up to that book entitled The Long Labrador Trail. The first is a true account of two friends who, in 1903, embark on a remarkable journey from New York City up into the wilds of Labrador, hoping to rendevous with the Nascaupee Indians during their annual hunt for migrating caribou herds. The Long Labrador Trail is a continuation, of sorts, of the first story, and is equally engaging... a fine read for a lazy indian summer afternoon. Clicking the highlighted titles should take you directly to the free Project Gutenberg online versions of each book! Following are some photographs of the two gentlemen who embarked on the Labrador expedition, Leonidas Hubbard and Dillon Wallace, and their trusty guide George Elson...

Leonidas Hubbard awaiting departure from the shore in front of the Hudson's Bay Company at North West River, 1903

Dillon Wallace, Leonidas' friend and author of the book, awaiting departure, 1903

Elson and Wallace landing the canoe onshore along the Susan River, 1903

Wallace and Elson relax by a fire after lunch.

Wallace and Elson proudly display the head of a Caribou they killed.

Dillon Wallace portaging supplies with a goose hung at each side.

George Elson and Dillon Wallace take a rest and discuss the journey.

All above photos are courtesy of the Labrador Heritage Society via the Virtual Museum of Canada (Click on the latter for more photos and info about the Hubbard expedition but... read the book first!)

And one final note... food and wine pairings are a familiar idea, but might I suggest this... book and incense pairings! The perfect olfactory experience may be paired with any of the three aforementioned volumes by acquiring a "Seven Scent Incense Sampler" from Incienso de Santa Fe. For a mere $7.75, this set supplies seven different all natural wood based incense logs-- Juniper, Pinon, Cedar, Alder, Mesquite, Fir Balsam, and Hickory. Any of these may be ignited throughout the stories to complete the impression of.... sitting by a campfire eating cooked lake trout after a hard day of canoeing, working hard to fell a giant cedar in a clearing amid smoking stumps and piles of wood debris, spending an afternoon in a Native American longhouse upriver mourning the loss of a great chief...



The Seven Scent Sampler comes with a simple burning platform, but I am quite fond of my Pacific Northwest Ceremonial Longhouse, pictured above; it is only $7.00 and is supplied with a good quantity of Pinon logs to get you started!

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!!!