The Craftiest Workshop

After my snowshoeing fall where I broke my aluminum walking pole, I decided that I should perhaps resort to a wooden walking stick.

In early December, right after we moved into our new house, I cleared out some branches from the treed area on our property and created a pile. Wood for a walking stick can’t be fresh from a tree especially if you plan to burn on it. It needs to have dried or weathered a bit. When we had a few warmer days in mid Feb, the snow had melted and left the branch pile exposed. I managed to find a few sticks about the right size for a walking stick. They need to be relatively straight and I managed to find a couple with a ”Y” at the top where I would hold onto.

I sat outside in the sun on the south side of our garage and stripped off the bark and moss using a jackknife. Apparently there is history of whittling on my dad’s side of the family. It is quite relaxing. I had to use a rusty handsaw (my bandsaw has not yet been moved) to remove a few larger side branches off the sticks and cut off the bottom end so it was even. My next step was sanding the sticks down with my mouse sander.

One of the sticks had lots of bug trails gracing the outer part of the stick. They don’t dig deep, they just graze the surface leaving sawdust trails. After seeing how many little trails there were, I decided to clean them out with my knife and a paint brush. I then used my wood burner to burn the areas that had been dug out.

The other stick that I found had no bug trails but some nice knots in it and more wood colour variation. The idea I had for this stick was to burn in the “Footprints in the Sand” poem in a swirling fashion from top to bottom. Burning takes time and it allowed me to really focus on the words and meaning of the poem. After I burned in the words, I decided that it needed footprints in between the words. I thought I would add some colour so I painted a yellow, blue, red footprint pattern to represent faith, hope and love. I was painting the blue and yellow with thoughts of Ukraine on my mind. The idea with this stick was that no matter where life leads you, you would be reminded that the Lord is always walking with you.

To preserve the sticks, I decided to start by adding a few layers of polycrylic just to seal it and hopefully prevent any cracks from getting larger.
I hung them in a closet to dry.
I will probably use Spar Urethane to coat them for outside use.

Here are the two sticks after the first few layers of sealer.

Creating your own walking stick takes a bit of time but the sky is the limit for how you can personalize it.

Every piece of wood is unique and you never know what you will find after you peel off the bark.
Now I have something unique to take walking and it will be especially useful when my husband drags me out for disc golf…lots of hills to climb.
It is also nice to have a reminder with you that you are always walking with the Lord.