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.
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