Welcome to my hobby! I fell in love with Willow; "DIAMOND Willow" to be exact. There is a lot of it on my land at my cabin, so I decided to do something with it other than feed the moose. (They love it too; see pic of moose taken from the cabin window)
Here are two UNfinished ones and a whole bunch of extra good UNfinished ones.
Hey, a retired old man has to have SOMEthing to do!
My cabin is in northern Alberta, Canada, and I am fortunate to have a lot of it growing in the virgin forest which is on my land; 190 acres of it. In that forest I have many hiking trails so it is possible to go anywhere and bring out the sticks; either by ARGO or with my "Stick-Shaw" or by hand.
I'm selling these beautiful pieces of "Pure Art By Mom Nature"; to see what I have available right now, see my site at http://www.sticksite.com. I have both "finished" sticks and "rough" ones. You will also find canes, birch sticks, hiking staffs etc on my site. There is no shortage of really BIG ONES either. LOTS of them. I call them "Rails" and "Cup or Lamp Stands."
Much of the Willow is too large for walking sticks, so I branched out and started making Willow Chairs and for awhile ran classes on making them. My main website has a page on that, with complete details on how you can make your own. After making a good number of these chairs, I decided to tackle a special project; a Diamond Willow Chair. See it below.
You can do all sorts of neat things with Diamond Willow; see what people have done at my page at http://www.sticksite.com/carvings/.
Here are my two most important tools in getting Diamond Willow out of the bush: my Cabin and my ARGO A.T.V. amphibious 8x8 machine. And that is one of the moose I have to compete with; as I watched her from the cabin window.
One great way to use the thick pieces is to make furniture; here is the chair I made; someday my kids are going to have to fight over this one! Also, the "Cupstand" or "Lampstand" or whatever else you can imagine using it for.
I sell Diamond Willow in these "formats" (for lack of a better word):
Hiking / walking sticks in various qualities (UNfinished)
Hiking / walking sticks FINISHED
Scout Sticks (for Scout groups)
Rails etc.
Just for fun, here is an UNfinished stick to show you the diamonds in "3D" If you get just the right distance from your monitor and try to focus on a point well behind the monitor, you can see the depth.
On my site at http://www.sticksite.com/ you will find more information and pictures than you can imagine, not only regarding Diamond Willow ("Pure Art by Mom Nature") but a whole raft of other neat things too.
Here are a couple of favorite short pieces:
