Sammy

Now that the latest Cherry paddle is complete, the pyrography stage has arrived. As mentioned in Part 1 of the post, the blade design was a replica of the c1849 Passamaquoddy paddle (Fig 72. Adney) currently in the collection of The Peabody Museum


Adney's sketch - Decorated Passamaquoddy on top


Peabody Museum paddle; Peabody Number 99-12-10/53655
My own Cherry version of this paddle decoration was based on a negative pyrography technique - burning the background at high heat to reveal the natural cherry tones in the scroll decoration. Cherry is an ideal wood for this technique and I was tempted to replicate the style again, but the I still vividly remember the huge amount of time needed to finish such a large piece with a tiny flow point tip. Plus, I wanted to get this paddle done in time for the National Canoe Day celebrations happening on June 26th in nearby Peterborough which I'm planning on attending (free admission to the Canadian Canoe Museum that day too!) Great way to get out of the city which is getting inconvenienced with the G8/G20 meetings downtown while also shutting down our cottage area up north this week.

It seemed fitting that since the blade shape was an identical twin, I should replicate this scroll pattern again, but this time a decision was made to try a a positive burning technique just to be a bit different. A hand-sketched image of this design drawn by Liz Reagan (which appears on page 20 of Graham Warren's book) shows the scroll pattern in a positive image technique. Given that the grip is a totally different design, I free handed some more scrolls to somewhat match the pattern the blade. This was completed easily over 2 days - a lot faster than the negative technique. Here are the shots before oiling:


Completed Decoration; Blade Closeup
As a bit of an extra decoration, ended up using about 3 feet of leather lace to tie a decorative Turk's Head knot at the base of the grip, below my name on the paddle. Here are some shots of the grip after oiling...


Turk's Head knot; Decorated Grip; Natural Side
The side with the inferior grain pattern was chosen for the pyrography decoration. The other side with some nice grain lines and patterns was left natural. Here are the pics of both sides...


Final Paddle
Can't wait to dip this sucker into some water and get paddling season underway!

Another paddle design that intrigued me was that of the Beothuk paddle descibed by Adney. The tragedy of the Beothuk extermination in Canada means that nearly all reliable info on this tribe has been lost to history, but Graham Warren has a nice plan of a surmised paddle with a "bobble" style grip in his first book that I blogged about earlier.

Given the graceful sloping design of the blade and its similarity to the 17th Century replica paddle I'd been working on, I thought I could steam laminate some cherry edging on this one as well. This paddle is cut from Yellow Birch (Betula alleghaniensis) and following my steaming procedure from before, a cherry strip was heated and clamped around the edge of the paddle blade. I took these shots while working the garage up the cottage.


Steaming the cherry; Clamping to the blade
Unfortunately, this time around, once I removed the screw clamps, the cherry split under the pressure at the tight turn at the tip and the foaming Polyurethane glue sprayed everywhere creating quite a nasty mess. The bulk of the cherry edging is fixed quite well however, so to salvage this paddle, I resketched the tip a few inches higher and will have to settle for a shorter blade length and an incomplete edging effect.


Split Edging; Redrawn blade
Rather than re-sawing this out by hand, I've decided to wait on this and bring it back to the city for a visit to The Carpenter's Square where it'll be reshaped with their bandsaw. We'll see if this major mistake can be corrected or if the paddle will need to be cut up and made into something else.

Update: Part 2 posted HERE

From February's current selection page of Cherry Gallery Antiques...