Something Finished
It was a rainy Saturday (as opposed to a dark and stormy night). Actually, it was a beautiful rainy day, raining enough to know that it wasn't a desert, but not so hard that you got soaked to the skin, and mild enough that you could be out in it without getting chilled to the bone. We walked out to Sushi Man in the rain for lunch.
I finally made a handle for my shillelagh. For anyone who didn't get in on the ground floor, I'll say again that I have no need for a shillelagh nor any intention of wielding one. It's just that when I pruned the yew bush in front of the house two branches that I cut off looked as though they wanted to be shillelaghs. When a branch that's been growing patiently in front of my house for thirty years tells me it wants to be a shillelagh, I have to respect its wishes. So here is the finished product (or maybe not quite finished, because I think it needs a hole drilled in in near the end for a thong to hang from):
The fiber part is the grip, anchored by two three lead, seven bight (or do you count the bights on both sides, in which case, fourteen bight?) turks head knots, with one wide turks head in between. I've never been very fluent with turks-heads, so this is somewhat of a breakthrough.
Most of the grip is good strong cotton twine from the hardware store, Librett Durables cotton mason line no. 24. I started with loose three-lead turks heads, following the instructions in Geoffrey Budworth's The Complete Book of Decorative Knots, using some heavier cotton twine I had lying around. I cut seven two-fathom lengths (which was much to much -- I had almost a yard left over from each end of each length at the end, so I'm sure nine feet would have been plenty) of the number 24 cotton, tied a fine thread around each end of them so they wouldn't fray while I was working, and followed Ashley number 1289. I used the first turks heads instead of a constrictor to anchor the middles of the new cords.
By the way, when does a project change from a project you haven't been working on in a while to an unfinished object? I don't think there's a hard-and-fast time limit to that, but if not, what, or how do you know, or do you just know?
