Ancient Celtic and Nordic design

The style known as 'Celtic' seems to have originated in Europe around the Baltic area and then moved westwards ahead of the Romans, and then into north England and Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Ireland. It is distinguished by its ingenuity.

Early designs are based on simple incised decoration in linear pattern, mostly based upon the V-shaped chevron, combined with spirals and circles, connected in a variety of ways, then intriguing key and maze patterns and finally interlaced patterns and 'zoomorphics' involving interlaced animals, birds and humans. The patterns were found on burial chambers, memorial stones, metalwork, woodwork, leatherwork, pottery and manuscripts. The Nordic styles are similar but bear their own distinct stamp.

I found the spirals quite challenging. It is hard to turn the blade and keep the wood still, and easier to keep the blade still and turn the wood. You can see that I was having problems in the middle of this pattern where my hand slipped in one place and I also spoiled the key central area by not keeping my lines parallel.

copyright Shimmy 2013

This photo demonstrates quite a lot. Celtic spirals can take a number of different forms, and here you an see two-loop spirals around the edge and a three-loop spiral in the middle. Spirals can be joined to other spirals by either forming an S-configuration or a C-configuration. Another typical feature is that the space between the spirals is also a potential 'canvas' and it can be decorated to enhance the basic design and give more life to it. In this piece I used a cross-hatch to fill some of these spaces, and wider diagonal hatching for others.

I really like this next design. The spirals, S-shapes and C-shapes are still evident, but more subtle, and it was a lot easier to do. I used a cheap craft knife to score a very fine diamond cross hatch for the background, and a coarser hatching for the central spaces.

copyright Shimmy 2013

In keeping with the style of Celtic illuminated manuscripts, I divided my 'canvas' up into blocks, with the circular pattern in the centre and four blocks of woven lines on the outside. It looked good, I must admit, and it made it easier to have the straight lines to incise rather than the curves.

This next example breaks up the pattern in a different way, using a nice balance of the woven lines and empty space around the edge of the design. Again I have used the craft knife to make the shallow shading behind the interlaced men.

Such distorted interlaced figures are typical of later Celtic art, and the bearded men are often pulling one another's beards. This is my own variation of a classical figure from the illuminated manuscripts such as the book of Kells.

Best wood for kolrosing

It takes some time to develop strength in your hands sufficient to make clean cuts in the wood without the occasional slip, especially if you hit a bit of hard grain. I started with a pack of short offcuts from my woodturner pal, and had no idea about different woods at the time. My first project was a small ash plate which he had thrown in with the woodcuts. I chose it because the wood was pale and I thought that it would show up the kolrosing well - which it did - but it was really really hard to work with and I ended up with a blister (later a callus) at the bottom of my right index finger.

I designed an intertwining zoomorphic eagle design, and managed with my blistered hands to incise the design into the plate. Then the easy part of colouring it with cinnamon, sealing it with walnut oil, and it looked very nice.

Unbelievably, someone immediately asked to buy it, but I gave it to them as a present, and felt very pleased with myself. Only later did I realise that there was a serious design flaw. If you follow the eagle's head along its neck and in and out of the loops, you will find that it links to another head! And the tails link to the tails! And eagles don't have tails, do they? And snake tails should have a head somewhere... Oh well, at least I did not charge for it. :)

I then progressed to pine. This was much easier and it looked good, too. One of the bits my pal had given me was a nearly square blank that already had the edges shaped. I was not sure what I wanted to do with it, but it ended up as a chess board.

I found the straight lines and repetitive pattern useful to be able to focus on building strength in my hands and controlling the blade rather than struggling with getting those tricky loops going the right way!

The problem, though, is that the hardness of the grain in pine is a bit unpredictable and some bits of the darker grain can be really solid and you end up with a slip and a cut in the wood where you did not want one. Nowadays I know that I can seal these inadvertent mistakes to prevent them taking up the stain - but this poor old chessboard carries the scars of my inexperience.

The squares have a woven pattern, which was hard to do at first but became intuitive after a while, and the edges are what is called a 'key' pattern.

I measured out he squares and marked them in pencil directly onto the wood. I then made the mistake of trying to draw the lines by cutting against the edge of a plastic ruler. The ruler was a 12 inch one and the lines 18 inches, and the ruler kept slipping and it was a bit of a mess. Now that my hands know what they are doing, I just draw the line and cut the incision freehand without being guided by the ruler.

While I was trying out tools and techniques, and building up strength in my hand, I ordered a piece of American basswood from Amazon, but had to be patient while waiting for it.

Without a workshop, I really needed the bits of wood already shaped - either routed around the edges or shaped into a spoon or other utensil. I started to scratch around the supermarkets and found some very cheap kitchen wooden spoons at Asda - £1.50 for a pair comprising a rounded spoon and a flattened pan scraper, both with flat handles - and that was great. I went home with a bunch of these to practice on. The wood was beech, and for all I know came from China, although the spoons bore a label to confirm that the wood had been ethically sourced. One can buy such spoons in bulk from the East via www.alibaba.com but I am not in the game yet of ordering them by the thousand! This wood was extremely pleasant to work on, with an attractive fleck throughout the wood but no real grain issues. It tended to stain a little bit when I rubbed on my bark mix - although I later worked out a solution for that.

From Asda, too, I bought a wooden chopping board that I am sure is 'rubberwood' - it was not so easy to work with, but ok - and the real problem was that the wood has so much of its own colour that my design did not really show up that well.

Finally the little basswood blank arrived - and wow! It was like cutting butter! Although the finished product shows a grain, while carving it the grain is soft and little different from the rest of the wood. It is not unlike balsa wood that one uses for making model aeroplanes, but it is a bit firmer and goes harder after oiling. The board was really light and easy to hold and work, it took the cuts and colour well, and developed a warm pleasant colour with the oil and wax finish that I applied. I am hooked on basswood. I chose a celtic key pattern for the chess squares and an interlocked birds ('zoomorphic') for the sidebars, and it looked good, although the board is really too small to be comfortable playing on.

In the UK the wood is not called basswood but is called limewood. Although it is not difficult to buy, I have not found any local supplier who sells blanks already shaped and routed like one can in the USA. I am still looking, but meanwhile I have ordered some more USA basswood and will just swallow the postage.

Background to my new hobby

Kolrosing is apparently an ancient method of decorating items (horn, bone, wood) by incising shallow cuts and rubbing coal dust into the cut. It is Scandanavian in origin and now I think largely thought of in relation to Saami reindeer herders. Its counterpart - 'barkrosing' - is the same technique except that powdered bark is used as colorant. A related technique is 'scrimshaw', historically a craft of mariners where highly detailed and often very tiny drawings are produced rather than the cruder kolrosing/barkrosing patterns.

Surprisingly there is not much to be found on the internet about kolrosing, and it now seems to be largely the preserve of 'bushcrafters' who want to decorate knife handles and simple eating utensils, and it was on these sites that I first stumbled across the technique.

I had wanted an evening-time hobby that I could do in an armchair and which was not very messy and needed little in the way of equipment. I initially researched wooden cookie moulds, but found I soon found some things that put me off - working in negative relief was a challenge and the special gouges for carving in negative relief suggested to me that I would be always at the sharpening block trying to get the right edge on the knife. Then I hit on 'chip carving' which required only a couple of simple knives, and I invested in one of these via the internet. Then a pleasant wood-turner man in a neighbouring village kindly gave me a pile of wood offcuts, and a handful of carving knives he did not want, and I set to.

However, I found it a challenge to chip carve anything but the softest woods with little grain - not a great problem in itself - but what really put me off was the little chips flying out all around me and often near my eyes. I lresearched the possibility of pyrography, but someone mentioned to me that their smoke alarm kept going off when they were learning this technique, and that did not seem to fit my bill of a quiet evening in my armchair. Then I discovered kolrosing, which looks very similar to pyrography but the design is arrived at in a very different way. What I am doing is really a mixture of kolrosing and barkrosing, as I use bark (cinnamon) and ash (from my incense burner), but I am happy to call what I do kolrosing.

The technique involves making a shallow cut, no more than a millimetre, into the wood and perpendicular to it. Into the cut one rubs the colourant, say cinnamon, using the finger tips and a round-and-round motion. It does not look very interesting until the 'fixative' is applied, in my case walnut oil. The walnut oil is added while the cinnamon is still on the wood, and both are rubbed round and round, and the oil sinks into the wood and the whole design comes miraculously to life. Then I wipe the oil off with a soft cloth, and any pencil marks disappear at the same time, and I leave it for a while, give it a little sanding, add some more oil and leave it overnight before waxing it the next day with a special wax that I make that I will go into later.

The wonderful thing is that it is not very messy, and it smells wonderful. Even the dog noses around, hoping to get a lick of the walnut oil.

Reared from gold

My Shetland ancestors on my father's side were largely fishermen, although my great grandfather owned and ran a general store on Yell, the bottom part of which still exists on the island as part of the boatyard.

His oldest son, my grandfather, followed his father's occupation although he left Yell to live in Aberdeen, where he started his own grocery. His premises in Aberdeen, too, are still in service, albeit currently serving as the Red Cross shop. In the 1920's, with wife and son in tow and having fallen on harder post-war times, that branch of my family emigrated to South Africa, where my grandfather found employment in the grocery division of a biggish Department Store.

Amongst my Scots ancestors on my mother's side the men in the family had embraced the industrial revolution as miners, and my grandfather as a young man was a skip operator on the mines near Kilsyth. After his move with his own wife and family to South Africa he found work again as a skip operator, but this time in one of the deep gold mines of the Johannesburg reef. My parents, hailing thus from northern Britain, found themselves by serendipity to be in the same class of a working class school in a small mining town in South Africa.
My father took to mining, too, becoming an assayer and then a metallurgist to the gold mines around Springs and Brakpan. In 1954, in our turn, my parents and my sibs and I emigrated to 'Southern Rhodesia', my father attracted to the gold mines there. I had heard of Cornwall as a child, as one of our dear friends on the mine had actually been a Cornish miner. That part of Cornwall where I now live is a laid-back part of the world beloved of surfers, but in times not long gone bye it was a hub of industry and trade. Rich in tin and other metals, Cornwall had been known for a millennium or more for its mining and metalwork, and Cornish mining methods became very influential throughout the world. As the tin ran out in Cornwall in the 20th century, Cornish miners and Cornish mining expertise spread throughout the mining world.

The Cornwall landscape is still peppered with the enigmatic buildings of the mining engine houses, and there is still a busy local industry in creating tin, silver and gold jewellery, much of it created with Celtic knotwork and other classic Celtic designs. In fact there is a bit of a 'Pictish' frenzy in Britain, where young people, men and women, pride themselves in their Celtic body tattoos, and Celtic knotwork patterns embellish just about every possible surface.

Celtic Style

I began to become interested in these wonderful designs when I was a small girl. My ex-Aberdonian granny knitted 'fairisles' for the department store where grandpa worked. The patterns were all marked out on squared paper, and she skillfully wove together the many colours and designs into pullovers that were in high demand at that post-war period.

My other grandmother knitted babywear and shawls in incredibly fine one-ply, and always had to cover the bit that was knitted with a spotlessly-clean flourbag so that it did not get dirty, and her hands were always kept soft with the use of butter as her night-cream. These items, too, bore classical patterns of the Highlands and Islands.

This lovely video gives a background to the Shetland knitting heritage, and the fine work my grandmother used to do, even though she herself was not a Shetlander.

 

Not long ago I discovered a wonderful and classic book by George Bain, and this led me to appreciate not only the intricacies of the interlaced knotwork, but also the Pictish spirals and key patterns often of great complexity. From the latter, I recognised what had influenced my Grandmother's knitted 'fair-isles' - those amazing but almost extinct pullovers of intricate repeating patterns and colours. Of course, contemporary Scandinavian knitware still uses such patterns. Scottish and Irish island ladies had an ancient history of incorporating Celtic, Pictish and Norse design in to their knitware, including the knotware, such as in Aran styles. No wonder that I myself felt so drawn to these patterns despite growing at the other end of the world.

In 2012 I was struggling to repair a little tea-caddy that I have owned for many years, and which had some decoration on it that I was told had been done with pyrography by my Shetland grandfather. I liked greatly the idea of working on a finished product, rather than having to produce it from scratch, and I eventually decided to try my hand at a form of craft hailing from the Scandinavia - Kolrosing-  and to include any Celtic, Pictish and Norse designs in my work.

Celtic Roots and Viking Blood

Born a fair-skinned redhead in South Africa and raised in the African sun of Zimbabwe, I always felt out of place amongst my peers. My having red hair and freckles seemed to give a licence to all and sundry to tease and call me 'carrot top', 'rooi kop', 'ginger', 'freckle-face'. My closest childhood friend, Helen, had skin that loved the sun, and we always had to find a spot at the pool where she could lie on her towel in the sun while I lay covered by my towel in the shade, with a hat over my face.

Now that I am older, and live in Cornwall in the UK, I no longer need to hide from the sun, and I have come to look back fondly on that red-haired child, knowing that it was my Celtic roots and my Viking blood that made me stand out so. My father's family was from the Shetland Isles, and I doubt that there are few from that part of the world who do not have a good handful of Viking genes. My red-headed mother's family from the Pictish and Celtic Scottish Highlands almost certainly had a fair dollop of Viking genes too.

My grandparents on both sides had emigrated in the 1920's in one of the great Scottish diasporas, heading off in ships like my Viking forebears with pockets full of hope and little else other than a desire to find a better life. I was raised in the sun on oatmeal porridge, pancakes, girdle scones and Scots broth and a familiarity with the accents of my grandparents. I was their 'bonnie wee bairn' when I was good, told to 'dinna fash yersel' if I was upset or to 'wheesht' if I was crying. I was unaware that many of the funny words of my grandparents hailed from the Old Norse of their Viking forebears.

Many years ago I moved back from Africa to live in the UK, retracing by air the journey that they had taken by boat sixty years earlier. How far it must have seemed to them, sailing all the way to Cape Town from Aberdeen, into the unknown. They remained in South Africa for the rest of their lives, and I believe I was the first of that branch of the family to return to live in the UK. Now, as I myself grow old, I find myself deeply interested in my genetic past, and especially in my Shetland roots and Viking background.