Horsewright
Knifemaker / Craftsman / Service Provider
- Joined
- Oct 4, 2011
- Messages
- 11,737
We have a good friend named Cara. Cara is not big on blending in, which is a good thing since she is very tall for a gal at about 6'3". She came to us with an idea and it turned out to be the most complex, intricate, involved and difficult project Horsewright was ever involved in. What follows is basically a pictorial history of the event (actually took place here and there for a couple of months) finally finishing off on the weekend after New Years. This will be a longish post and I'll problably not get er done all at once so check back every once in a while if this interests you, there will probably be more. As always , comments question etc are very welcome.
So Cara brought over George. George is an old bearskin rug. I hung him over the office door to keep him out of the way, named him George and shook hands with him every morning when I'd go into the office. Cara said she'd like us to make her a pair of "woolies" using George. Woolies are leggings with hair on on the outside of the leg. Bear, buffalo. angora, sheepskin and all manner of critters have been used for this purpose. Woolies are an old style legging from the 1800s that are kinda making a resurgence. They are very expensive and difficult to make. I'd never made a pair and I've made many hundreds of pairs of different types of leggings. Woolies can be made as full chaps eiither batwing or shotgun styles or as chinks a shorter style of legging.
Cara wanted the yoke to be carved in a dragonfly pattern. Not just a dragonfly but a tatoo style dragonfly. This created a design change right from the get go as what she wanted would not fit on any of our standard yoke patterns. Hold on here we go:
Nichole carving the tatoo dragonfly on the new yoke pattern:
Here she has all the bevelling done and is doing the bar backgrounding. Meanwhile out in the shop I'm working on other parts. Here is one leg with the double fringe overlay part cut out. The original plan was to have the whole leg tourqouise with pink highlight fringe but that side wasn't big enough so we had to flop the colors. I also had to change the top of the leg quite a bit due to the new yoke pattern,.
After laying George out on the workbench I was pretty sure George wasn't enough bear for our project. I was very heistant to cut him up. Couple weeks later Cara had Roberto with her. Roberto was quite a bit more bear than George. However he was also a lot older. Roberto had some bald spots from moths and wear as well as other defects.. It was a challenge to get enough good material out of Roberto the rug but I did. Here he was split up the backbone.
After shaping Roberto to the size we needed for each leg there was a lot of hair trimming and shaving to do. The bearhide had to be glued to the pink leather and the the tourqoise fringe piece would in effect become a binding over the top, finishing the raw edge of the hide.
We spent a lot of time fitting parts together. Here we're making sure the hide is in the right spot and then being over lapped correctly by the yoke. The yoke has been finished with its tooling but has not yet been oiled or finished.
One of the most difficult parts was getting the bottom of the hides to fit just right. There are many pairs of woolies out there where the hide is just squared off. Part of our design criteria was to have the hair hanging down over the bottom in a natural fashion. Making this happen was tough. Finally came up with the idea of cutting the leather part of the hide extral long, taping back the guard hairs, trimming the fine fur back up underneath the guardhairs and then trimming the leather part of the hide to fit. Sounds easy, wasn't.
So Cara brought over George. George is an old bearskin rug. I hung him over the office door to keep him out of the way, named him George and shook hands with him every morning when I'd go into the office. Cara said she'd like us to make her a pair of "woolies" using George. Woolies are leggings with hair on on the outside of the leg. Bear, buffalo. angora, sheepskin and all manner of critters have been used for this purpose. Woolies are an old style legging from the 1800s that are kinda making a resurgence. They are very expensive and difficult to make. I'd never made a pair and I've made many hundreds of pairs of different types of leggings. Woolies can be made as full chaps eiither batwing or shotgun styles or as chinks a shorter style of legging.
Cara wanted the yoke to be carved in a dragonfly pattern. Not just a dragonfly but a tatoo style dragonfly. This created a design change right from the get go as what she wanted would not fit on any of our standard yoke patterns. Hold on here we go:
Nichole carving the tatoo dragonfly on the new yoke pattern:
Here she has all the bevelling done and is doing the bar backgrounding. Meanwhile out in the shop I'm working on other parts. Here is one leg with the double fringe overlay part cut out. The original plan was to have the whole leg tourqouise with pink highlight fringe but that side wasn't big enough so we had to flop the colors. I also had to change the top of the leg quite a bit due to the new yoke pattern,.
After laying George out on the workbench I was pretty sure George wasn't enough bear for our project. I was very heistant to cut him up. Couple weeks later Cara had Roberto with her. Roberto was quite a bit more bear than George. However he was also a lot older. Roberto had some bald spots from moths and wear as well as other defects.. It was a challenge to get enough good material out of Roberto the rug but I did. Here he was split up the backbone.
After shaping Roberto to the size we needed for each leg there was a lot of hair trimming and shaving to do. The bearhide had to be glued to the pink leather and the the tourqoise fringe piece would in effect become a binding over the top, finishing the raw edge of the hide.
We spent a lot of time fitting parts together. Here we're making sure the hide is in the right spot and then being over lapped correctly by the yoke. The yoke has been finished with its tooling but has not yet been oiled or finished.
One of the most difficult parts was getting the bottom of the hides to fit just right. There are many pairs of woolies out there where the hide is just squared off. Part of our design criteria was to have the hair hanging down over the bottom in a natural fashion. Making this happen was tough. Finally came up with the idea of cutting the leather part of the hide extral long, taping back the guard hairs, trimming the fine fur back up underneath the guardhairs and then trimming the leather part of the hide to fit. Sounds easy, wasn't.
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