Kolrosing – the Journey

Working with youth I became interested in mountain men, men like John Colter, Jedediah Smith, and Jim Bridger. Attending mountain man rendezvous I became familiar with trappers equipment, such as black powder rifles, powder horns, and flint & steel (used to make fire). Wanting to make a powder horn, I learned about scrimshaw, the handiwork created by whalers. It is made by making fine cuts with a knife, then rubbing ink into the cuts to reveal the pattern. Whale teeth and ivory are hard to come by these days. What else could be used? If you can scrimshaw on bone and ivory why not do it on wood?

Doing scrimshaw on wood involved a lot of trial and error. I knew I had to seal the wood. My first attempt was a wood glue and water coating. This worked somewhat but was very ugly. I settled on wood varnish. This works very well and looks great. Varnishing wood is time consuming; time that could be used for actual scrimshawing. What to use for ink was another problem. Markers don’t work unless you want the younger kids to just color the wood so they don’t have to use a knife. By the way, little kids really enjoy being involved. India ink and wood stain became the ink of choice. All went well until the bottle of stain spilt on the table. Tests with Kool-Aid, Jello and charcoal had mixed results. Grinding up charcoal is very messy. What comes as a fine power is inexpensive and is it non toxic? Cocoa, straight out of the can, cocoa!

Years later I discovered the art of kolrosing (cole-rose-ing). Kolrosing is an old Scandinavian art form, dating back to Viking times. This is exactly what I have been doing all along. Scrimshaw uses bone, whale teeth or ivory. Kolrosing is done on wood. Traveling from Mountain Men through scrimshaw on to kolrosing has been an interesting and fun journey.

For information on Kolrosing email Kolrosing@bbairn.com

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