Shetland stole

Another interest of mine; lace-making - knitted lace, crocheted lace, needle-made lace. This stole is knitted in fine 2-ply wool, using No. 10 needles(UK), so it's not the finest Shetland knit. The diamond-shaped motifs at each end are known as shells and, traditionally, these borders differ in knit motifs from the centre. Dimensions are 2' x 5'.

It's from a traditional Shetland pattern from the 1940s, but with a different edging and more faggoting (the lines of criss-cross, very open stitch just above the edging) created by using herringbone stitch to fix the edge to the body of the stole.

The history of Shetland lace is interesting. Although Shetlanders had, for some centuries, knitted stockings and gloves for export, some lacy, some not, the finest lace knitting using delicate homespun yarn didn't really get going commercially until about 1830, when it started to be sold on the mainland. It turned into a cottage industry and knitters from all over the islands supplied Queen Victoria's court and other wealthy buyers with shawls, stoles, christening gowns, caps, gloves, socks, stockings and other items until the early part of the C20th. It then fell out of fashion and the art was in danger of being lost until the latter part of the century. Now, there is growing interest in this kind of lace which means that trade, too, is beginning to pick up.

A Book

It's made from old boxwood, with horn inlays of different colours and gold leaf underneath. It’s for a friend's 80th birthday; he's a writer, hence the book. The symbolism of the tree and the inscription on the back are personal to him; he'll know what they mean. The colours are deliberately autumnal, denoting, with affection, I hope, his age. Dimensions are 1 1/2" x 1 1/4" x 7/16".

I wanted an old-looking book, but not one with a damaged spine or corners, so worked on textures and distressing the surface. I discovered two things: gilding is a skill, so I settled eventually for a crinkled gold appearance underneath the horn inlays; carving the bezels in which to set the inlays also requires a delicate hand.

The inlays have 23k red gold leaf under the tree and roundel on the back (it has some Hebrew lettering underneath; the word “chai” means “life”).

Wood stains used were 1) a mixture of coffee and redbush and 2) a mixture of cochineal and turmeric, diluted; applied in different places and with different intensities.

The wood has reddish bands through it, visible on the spine, and I wanted to tie those in with the surface staining and the colour of the box. The 'page edges' and beading were left unstained. The piece was then lightly sanded to 12,000 grit and lightly oiled.



The box was handmade, too, and covered with a thick handmade, though printed, Japanese paper.

Experiment

As well an an experiment, this was also a deliberate exercise in self-criticism. Any artist in order to develop, needs to know what works and what doesn't. It's also important to have critiques from peers and teachers, of course, but it's more important for an artist to develop his or her own critical eye.

I had had a boxwood blank hanging around for about a year, so as I wanted to experiment with incised work and sunken relief, I produced this netsuke of a Boshi pear; dimensions - 32 x 26 x 9mm. Boxwood:

The image is roughly lifesize in the first photo, slightly larger in the following ones, boxwood, showing both undercutting and incising techniques. I'm not very pleased with it. It shouldn't have been done on wood, though, as an experiment, and having practised the techniques on scraps of wood, I wanted to see what happened. It's impossible to use veiners or gouges on something so small, so I used knives, straight and curved, and gravers. It meant that the incised lines were not true, as I have no engraving skills. Also, when working on a busy bit (eg., where the pear joins the twig/leaves), there's a tendency to overwork and mush the grain ends, so the line becomes fuzzy. The incising was better on the back where I used sewing needles mounted in cork. Lesson learned.

The design, I think, is top heavy, though it didn't seem so in my drawings/sketches, and too squarely aligned. The first is due a bit to the heavy incision lines of the leaves and twig; the second is due to my eye being out when I transferred the drawing of the piece to wood. The contour of the leaf at the side seems a little square and cornered where it should be rounded. I should also have put my initial on the side and made the leaf on the back differently. Again, lesson learned.

I quite like the undercut pear and if I do something like this in wood again, I might stick with that technique and not bother with fine incision work except with needles.

So, really, this is an experimental clunker. It's certainly not saleable by my lights. I put it up so people can see what an, in parts, poorly executed netsuke looks like.

Mon: Family crests and design

I was given this book as a Christmas present. It's a reprint from a 1913 edition, so the mon aren't completely up-to-date. What's fascinating is the simplicity of the early designs, the stylization of others and the complexity of what I assume are some of the later designs.

Now, I gather, organisations, businesses and many other groups and people have designed their own mon and use them instead of logos; their number must run into many thousands of designs. Originally, mon were used much as heraldry is in the West, first for identification on the battlefied and at court; later, on banners as well as arms and armour, many household and decorative artifacts and even on kimono and haori jackets.

Very few in the book could be adapted for netsuke of the manju or kagamibuta type, but they are a source of thought and allow the mind to spin in other directions concerning what can be used for decorating these kinds of netsuke.

It led me to think about design in relation to all the basic shapes of netsuke. Katabori (figural netsuke) allow for studies in the round; the design element here is about how lifelike or not the carver intends the figure to be. The flatter netsuke don't have this quality as they rely on applied designs. These can range from something as simple as the simpler mon, to highly detailed inlaid, incised, relief or urushi (lacquer) work. Ryushi, pierced netsuke, of course, rely on creating artistic and pleasing spaces within the work. Each shape determines, to some extent, the nature of the design.

More on Power Tools

I don't like them and don't like the one I bought. They're noisy, crude and clunky to hold. I much prefer using hand tools and would use the rotary tool only for initial roughing out. Even then it takes quite a bit of delicacy and skill not to gouge out too much of the unwanted material.

To date, I've three unfinished netsuke on my desk, but much of my free time this past six months has been taken up with family illness and I've been making things I can more easily take around with me - Hardanger embroidery, designing and knitting a Shetland shawl and christening robe and a fabric construction.

I also invested some pennies in a couple of contemporary cheap Chinese netsuke, just to see how awful the carving and finishing was. They're pretty dire. The subject matter is uninspiring in a cheap knock-off kind of way, the finish is a gritty varnish, the carving is as minimal and slap-happy as it's possible to get and the himotoshi are a joke. As for the "signatures," don't get me started! What a waste of good boxwood! Why people buy these things for decoration, I'll never understand, but buying them for studying is a good lesson in what not to do. In that regard, it was money well spent, though I certainly shan't be buying any more.

Power Tools

I finally succumbed and bought a cheap, unbranded rotary tool, more out of curiosity than anything else. I'll buy an expensive one if I take to using them. So far, the only use I can see for it is for roughing out a design; it takes some of the drudgery out of the basic work. I certainly wouldn't use it for detailed work and I'm not enamoured of the noise, the vibrations or of the nonsense with masks and dust collection; they interfere with the almost contemplative process of making a netsuke entirely by hand. All in all, I still have doubts about its use, though I know that the old Japanese carvers used bow-string operated drills and suchlike from time to time.

It comes with a useful range of drills and abrasive bits and pieces that can always be used as hand pieces if I decide not to go the mechanical way.

If it is going to be used, there are certain necessary precautions to be taken. Well-fitting face-masks are essential; silicosis is not an option in my life. It's important to practice on spare pieces of wood for quite a while before using it on a piece for completion; it takes time to get used to the speed and rhythm of the tool and use it with a delicate, controlled touch. It's also essential to hold the piece in either a small table vice or a hand vice; you'd be surprised at how much in the intitial stages of learning the tool slips. Gouging through a hand with one of these things wouldn't be much fun. After turning off the tool, don't touch it to change bits, or lay it down on the workbench until the chuck has stopped spinning and be aware that the chuck can get hot.

Re-reading this list of caveats, I'm beginning to wonder quite why I bothered buying it. Maybe my attitude will change with time and familiarity, though.

Next Step - Citrus

The basic design has been blocked out in ink. Here, I'm following
a number of drawings that are really studies of dried clementines and lemons. Mostly clementines don't have pips, though I've found some that did, and as I want to imitate the clementine shape and outer colours, I've mostly studied those. Both shape and colours are fairly complex, so it'll be another test to see if I can make my drawing concrete.

The dried fruit shows many indentations on the surface, so the cross-hatching in the design will be where this takes place. The vertical lines indicate where the fruit has dried along the edges of its sections; these show deeper indentations than the part which will show the sections of the fruit. The arrangement of pips will show some cut in half and others whole.

Tools I'm using at the moment? Some mini-gouges, tiny knives and scrapers. All had to be made and I might have to make one or two more curved ones to get into small, skewed recesses.

Half a Citrus

This is in boxwood - much easier to carve than tagua, knots and ridges notwithstanding. This wood is much used by netsuke carvers because its hardness and fine grain holds small, carved details very well.

I'm using some dried limes, lemons and clementines for live models, as can be seen on my carving slab, some photos for the inner parts and some drawings of tricky parts. It will be worked all over with texture, which will make it quite rough in the hand; if all goes well there won't be any smooth, polished part.

The staining will be time-consuming as there are so many variations across the outer peel and the inner 'flesh' and pips. The himotoshi will be formed from the bent stem at the bottom of the netsuke. The dimensions will be roughly 3.8mm x 2.5mm.

I'll try to take photos at various stages on development, so something can be seen of the processes involved. The current one shows the wood rough with the sections of the fruit and pips drawn in and some shaping to the underside. Beside it are the various dried fruits themselves. I'll be following the Clementine shaping of the dried example reasonably closely, though with some modifications.

Wasps' Nest

I've finished the tagua nut sliver which was started about June 2009. It's really just an experiment in high-gloss polishing and bas-relief work with what is essentially a flat plane across the tree and nest and isn't meant to be a netsuke, though it originally was. It's very tactile and feels good in the palm of the hand. I followed the design in the nut when I cut it across and 'found' the rough shape of the nest within, though I did some drawings before carving. The nut will darken to a honey brown over time, so the bark of the tree will be more distinct and the cracks on the bark will fill with dirt, making them more obvious. The stain on the nest and leaf will also correspondingly darken.

Originally, the back of the design was going to have himotoshi, an incised beehive and my initials, but after practicing incising on spare pieces of nut, the material really isn't suitable for it in very small detail, as all such incised work on tagua tends to have rough edges and background and looks crude. I then decided that I liked the feel of the polished tagua as is, so following my original thoughts of letting the nut dictate the outcome, I decided further to leave out the himotoshi and initials. So it's now really a one-dimensional, hand-held, relief miniature. Another instance of how the design can be changed in the making to one more suitable to the material! It's also another lesson learned - don't attempt to push the material too much beyond the limits of what it can do.

Tagua's really nasty for carving fine details because it has a tendency to chip and I don't generally find it to be a sympathetic medium, so am glad to get back to carving boxwood. When hard, the nut has a grain, which is laid down in layers as the tagua has dried. Working along the grain causes tools to slip and skid as the surface is like very hard candle wax; working across the grain can cause chipping, so only really tiny tools, much magnification and hours of scraping will overcome this tendency. It'll be a long time before I work the material again.

Tagua, wasps' nest, angled sliver from 3/16th" on the smooth, highly polished side to 1/2" on the matt 'tree' side, with the nest, twigs and leaf being a little polished; no detail on the reverse, just highly polished. Overall dimensions, just under 2" x 1 1/4". Very light staining on nest and leaf; turmeric and saffron on nest; turmeric, paprika and white tea on leaf; mordant for stain - alum. No acid mordant used for tagua, as a practice piece showed some disintegration of the nut surface; polishing papers up to 12,000 grit.

Tack Bowl

It's been a busy family summer, but I'm back to work now.

I wanted a support for carving netsuke, but didn't want a fixed bench peg, the traditional way carvers hold their work to steady it when carving.

I took an idea from a metalworker's pitch bowl, but scaled it down considerably. I found an almost hemispherical 5" metal bowl with a lip, hammered it into more of a hemisphere, part filled it with lead fishing weights, then filled it with white tack. The support for the bowl was made with four pieces of a thick scart cable, each taped together with insulating tape. The resulting rings were placed on top of each other and the whole ensemble covered with more insulating tape and two courses of looped stringing. It was then covered with cotton tape to finish it.

The carving is placed on the white tack, or, rather, a pit is dug in the tack, making a secure hold for the piece being carved. The contraption works and is heavy enough to hold the piece steady, without the bowl support slipping, when carving. Even with the lip, the bowl tilts as much as I'll need for carving purposes. Cost? About £5.00 and a couple of hours of work. Of course, I've now found out that there are small jewellers' pegs that can be clamped to a workbench and removed when not being used, but I'm satisfied so far with the d-i-y arrangement.

Snags

I'm half-way through carving a tagua nut netsuke and have hit difficulties, wanting to engrave a simple design on the back, but being completely new to engraving in any form. That being so, I've been practising the art on odd bits of nut for what seems like weeks, but the results are crude; the line's still uncertain, wobbly, even, and I'm getting more and more frustrated.

I know there's no substitute for continued practice and I'm determined to get it to the state where I feel confident enough to tranfer the results to the real thing. If I don't learn to do it now, I'll have to learn how to do it later, so it's a question of just ploughing on.

What I am learning, though, is while I'm quite confident about transferring the crafts I know, like dyeing and staining, to netsuke, when it's something I don't know, then I'm back to crudity and lack of confidence. What is odd, though, that I had no such issues when starting to carve in the first place, so I still can't really understand why engraving is such a problem. Oh, well, it's all in a good cause, I suppose. Moan over!

Erm, a revelation's just happened and might help. How daft can you get?

I visualised the results of what I was carving quite strongly before and as I was carving; I haven't done so with the engraving, even though I have sketches and drawings of what I want to achieve. In any art work I've completed in the past, I always had pretty strong internal visualisations of what I wanted to achieve, even if I changed things slightly while in the making of it. I've more of a sense now of what I need to concentrate on with etching; focus on achieving the outcome and stop fretting about tool use. Time will tell if I'm in the throes of delusion!

Hippo Ivory

I've recently acquired a whole hippo tusk (or tooth)from the lower jaw, 50 years old, much cracked, but with enough whole material to carve a number of netsuke and have lots left over for ojime, inlay work and other projects. At 4lbs weight, the most massive tusk I've ever seen, its cost of £100 was pretty reasonable.

I haven't yet sawn into it and am still studying where I should do so, but I have taken off some of the enamel and the underlying ivory is very white.

Its provenance is unusual. It was brought back to the UK in 1950 by a retiring member of the Ugandan Police Force and was acquired in Jinta, Uganda around the same date. It was inherited recently by the man who sold it on to me.

Hippos weren't a protected species in those days, and even in the early days of the CITES legislation, it still wasn't protected. Now it is, though not to the same degree as elephant ivory.

After inquiries to CITES/DEFRA, it was deemed legal to sell it on to me as both the seller and myself are in the UK, but if I do carve it and if ever those carvings are sold abroad, they'll require CITES certificates, which is why it's necessary to know the material's provenance.