Ancient Living Skills

Roots just finished its first Ancient Living skills course, and Nick, Sarah, and I are impressed once again with our students passion and the power of natural materials to teach and inspire awe. We made the decision to start all processes from the beginning, making stone and bone tools a part of each project we worked on. Testing the limitations of stone and bone tools, noting which worked well and which did not students and instructors continued to hone their understanding of working natural materials with natural materials.

For once I got to sit back and relax a little at a class, as Nick taught the rawhide burden baskets and pine bark canteens, and Sarah taught advanced fibers, assisted spindles, and some basic weaving. Both of them laid down hard to find knowledge and hard earned experience about processes and materials. This left me with bone knives, soap stone carving, and stone tools. I was pleased with how the students pushed themselves to use the stone tools, scoring and splitting their cannon bones for knives, using flakes to cut rawhide lashings, and using their bones knives to cut the bark for their pine bark canteens.

I also had time to do some personal work and put together this red eared slider shell tackle box...kind of a mouthful, but a lot of fun to make. I used only stone and bone tools for this project and enlisted the help of Laura to do some of the rawhide work because my hands are way to big to do anything but reach in and out of the shell. Coming up with a project like this one out of nowhere is a good challenge and I enjoyed immensely working this new material of turtle shell with stone tools and incorporating it with buckskin and rawhide was sweet.