No. 054 - A thistle-nose market stick in ram's horn with a sweet chestnut
shank.
Robert emailed from S. Carolina, USA, asking if I could make him a stick like
my No. 048 ram's horn stick. Pretty soon we were discussing details, but it was
some three months before I could start work on it as I was engaged in a
full-time temporary job at that time. This stick was obviously going to be a
major project and I needed to be able to give it my full attention. I was lucky
in finding a suitable horn quite quickly, but it proved rather a difficult one
to work. It took a further three months to complete the project, working around
the various problems that arose.
Problems of one sort or another are always likely to occur when working with ram's horn, and I reckon the test of a stickmaker's art lies in how he deals with these. In this case, I needed to cut away some material in the neck. I dealt with this by splicing a wedge of black & white horn from a blackfaced ram into each side of the neck. This created a whole new feature and set the basis of the design for the whole stick.
The spacer is of deer antler and the joints, along with the inevitable little crevices in the horn, are embellished with brass-filled resin.
Robert sent me this pin, which I embedded in resin on the back of the neck. By this time we had settled on the dark chestnut shank and the black-and-gold theme was well established, so I used a black background for it.
I continued this theme in the thistle nose with more brass resin inlays.
At the front end I was unable to avoid revealing a band of white "flint", the fibrous core of the horn. Often this will polish up nicely after impregnating with resin, but on this occasion it didn't, so I filled the area with more brass resin.
SOLD - a commissioned work