|
| 113 - A sturdy antler and pearwood hiking staff. Maximum overall length approx. 51" / 130cm Height to handgrip approx. 48" / 122cm | 
|
| This lovely big knobbly pearwood shank was just crying out to be made into a
hiking staff. The rather bulbous top end tilts forward, providing an almost
perfect handgrip. But there wasn't enough material above the knob to prevent it
slipping out of the hand. It needed something on top to complete the ideal grip
and to get the balance right. I searched through my stock and eventually found
a nice piece of red deer antler to do the job. Now the top of this shank is an
irregular shape, while antler comes in all sorts of different shapes and sizes.
It is one of those unwritten rules of nature that you will never find a piece
of antler that exactly matches the size and shape of the shank you want to fit
it to. This usually means using an extended spacer to blend the two shapes
together. However in this case the base of the antler was a perfect match to
the end of the shank, so I just inserted a normal-sized horn
spacer for decoration. |
   
|
| The antler coronet had been taken from a culled animal, so had a knob of bone
attached. Rather than work this down to the conventional shallow dome shape of
a naturally shed antler, I decided to make a feature out of it and
resin-embedded a wren farthing in the top. | 
|
   
|
| I used a piece of ox horn to cap the end of the tine. Just for a change I made
an angled joint here and embellished it with brass-filled epoxy resin. The
joint is reinforced with a piece of brass tube. This is filled with black epoxy
resin, giving us a "Parisien eye" decoration at the tip. |
| The spacer is made from a piece of (I think) Texas longhorn cattle horn. This
has layers of grey, green and white running through it. | 
|
| I stripped the rather rough bark from the shank, then used walnut stain to
darken the colour just a little. The knots are fairly regularly spaced over the length of the shank, but become
increasingly knobbly towards the bottom end. This looks very impressive but
doesn't hamper one's use of the staff in any way. |   
|
| This is a stonkingly good solid hiking staff and I can thoroughly recommend it
to the serious walker. |
SOLD |