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.