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Old 07-21-2008, 03:34 PM
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KatherinePlumer KatherinePlumer is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: Oak Run, California
Posts: 233
Default Katherine's Contest Submission (Scrimshaw woo hoo!)

(If you would like to comment on this submission, you may do so by posting a reply in this thread. Thanks! Kaitlin)



Hi all! Okay, I'll jump on this bandwagon. I hesitate to call this a "tutorial" though... I don't think I've been at this nearly long enough to tutor anyone in anything. Unless you have a question about chickens, then by all means ask away. Seriously though, here's my take on this:

This is how I do scrimshaw, from prep to ending. You can sit back and either watch me make something really cool, or totally mess it up! Hey, learning process either way. :D

The piece I'm working on, at the moment I'm just calling it the bear scrim. It'll be titled when done, or somewhere in the middle, or whenever I come up with a good title.

This all started a while back. In my quest to explore every possible scrimmable surface (it's a long list!) I bought some little slabs of micarta on ebay. I guess there are different kinds of micarta, I haven't a clue what this stuff is, but it's light tan colored, and shows no grain when sanded (darn, I was hoping it would look like fake ivory).

So the first step, before I even figured out what do with it, was to sand the micarta, because it's pretty ugly stuff in its raw state. I'm not the world's greatest sander, so this took a while, but after going through the whole series of polishing paper, and then a polishing wheel with some fabulustre (there may be better ways of doing this, don't ever take my advice when it comes to sanding/polishing) I had a nice shiny smooth piece of micarta with pleasantly rounded edges....