Well now that the annual HCH Conference is over and the Horn and Bag combination for the Summer raffle at Dixon’s has been unveiled, I can finally post my contribution. A while back Ed McDilda contacted me and asked if I could provide the main horn for the Summer raffle. Of course I couldn’t say no that and readily agreed. It turned out that Gary Elsenbeck (yeoldecraftsman) was to contribute the bag and we put out two heads together to work out some details. Gary had an idea for a “Gambler’s” theme with both the bag and horn. He send me some sketches of his idea of the bag and I immediately thought of a horn featured in Madison Grant’s book Powder Horns and Their Architecture. This horn (on page 82) is a smallish horn only 5 ½ inches long but features carved bands, Pennsylvania “Dutch” engraving and a central band of raised dice. I thought I could use this horn for inspiration and scale it up for a main horn. Carving on a horn is one of my favorite aspects of the craft and something I do enjoy doing. My design for this horn, however would involve two raised bands of dice which would entail removing a lot of material from the body of the horn. Not too difficult but quite a bit of work. I went through my box of horn and choose a nice horn white and black horn that I thought would do nicely and started to work. Things were progressing nicely with the horn and I laid out and carved the two bands, smoothed the throat and carved the bulbous spout. Unknown and overlooked by me this horn had an internal crack in the body, which would have been no problem if I had left the body pretty much alone. As I worked the horn down and removed the material this crack became exposed. Dang it! I fretted over this for a few days trying to decide whether to scrap the horn and start over or continue. I finally decided to continue with the horn, at least for the time being and see how the final product turned out. The crack was sealed from the inside with epoxy so I wasn’t worried about leakage. The horn was engraved with the Pennsylvania Dutch motif and the dice carved in the bands. A third band was applied forward of the two carved bands which helped with the proportions. The crack though was visible and even though wasn’t a problem was in my eye ugly and didn’t fit. After setting the horn aside for a few days, I decided that I should do a “repair” of the horn and added several staples along the crack. That did the trick as the staples added some character to the horn and what was before a horn with a visible flaw was now a horn with an interesting feature. I went ahead and finished the horn and put some of my usual “antiquing” to it, but it still didn’t seem right to me. For some reason it looked bland and I wasn’t willing yet to use this for the HCH raffle.
I then decided to start another horn, this one more a Southern horn with applied bands but with the same raised dice and engraved with the same general Pennsylvania Dutch theme. About this time John DeWald (PA Horner) posted a beautiful banded horn with a striking finish to it. I found out that John used a paste wax/powdered paint combination so I thought to give it a try with this horn. I remembered that Tim Crosby uses shoe polish quite often on his horns and the waxy shoe polish is pretty much the same as pigmented paste wax. So I picked up a tin of brown shoe polish and used it on this horn. The effect and patina was nothing but striking.
I then decided to refinish the first horn using the shoe polish. The result was a deeper, mellower and warmer look to the horn; a completely different piece. The first horn definitely was the one to use for the raffle.
Last Christmas, I received a package from Kris Polizzi, a strap weaver from Pennsylvania, and in it was a beautiful strap with a note that I was one of her favorite horners and Merry Christmas! I have to say that this strap is one of the best I’ve seen of her work and knew that I had to use it with the raffle horn. With some leather tabs fitted to the strap it was a perfect match with the horn and I sent it off to Ed.
Now, while all this was going on with the two horns and trying to decide which to use, I got a call from Gary. Due to circumstances beyond his control, he was not able to make the original bag planned for this project. Looking over several bags he had on hand, we decided on one that fit great with the horn, so all in all, it worked out in the end.
The horn and bag were unveiled at the HCH Conference, I just wish that I could have been there for the unveiling...
Scott M
