Willow Bast

[Kepis]

Having run out of Willow bast over the weekend, a trip to the ponds today provided me with the opportunity to restock, two small saplings were duly felled and processed, the bark providing me with cordage material, the wood going into my carving wood pile.

Started scraping off the outer bark to reveal this amazing patterning, always fascinates me to see this.

20180903_125147 by Mark D Emery, on Flickr

Continued to scrape until most of the green had gone

20180903_140828 by Mark D Emery, on Flickr

then time to lift the bark, still surprisingly easy this late in the year

20180903_141249 by Mark D Emery, on Flickr

Came away more or less in one sheet

20180903_141437 by Mark D Emery, on Flickr

which was folded up and lashed ready for drying and storage

20180903_141640 by Mark D Emery, on Flickr

and all the time i was messing around with bark, me dear old mum was steadily catching fish

20180903_132620 by Mark D Emery, on Flickr

 

[Toddy]

Sorry Kepis
I saw the thread, thought it good stuff, and simply clicked "Like".
It's all too easy to just hit that wee button and add nothing to the thread. It's become a bad habit.

Great to see someone clearly show 'how' to take the bark and obtain the fibre rich inner bast and good on your Mum too

M

 

[Kepis]

Sorry Kepis
I saw the thread, thought it good stuff, and simply clicked "Like".
It's all too easy to just hit that wee button and add nothing to the thread. It's become a bad habit.

Great to see someone clearly show 'how' to take the bark and obtain the fibre rich inner bast and good on your Mum too

M

Know what you mean, im guilty of the Like button too , the old dear did well today, loads of fish, lost a couple of biggies too

 

[Robbi]

Ha ! Bloody marvelous ☺

 

[falcon]

What a great day all round

 

[Man of Tanith]

i do enjoy your posts mate

 

[Robson Valley]

Thanks for revealing your harvesting process. It's bound to encourage others.

But why a bundle? Would not a circle kink the fibers less? Or does that even matter?

 

[Kepis]

Thanks for your comments folks.

@Robson Valley its in a bundle because i only had a small bag with me, ie limitations of space and this was one of three bundles i had processed, once its been dried and rewetted its doesnt make any difference.

 

[Kepis]

While i was processing the bark yesterday i tried a little experiment with a couple of small pieces of Willow, as we all know you usually let the bark dry then wet it again to make it pliable when you want to make your cordage, but i thought id try three pieces as fresh as can be just to see what happened.

So i spun up three small lengths of cord, one green as green can be with the bark on (thigh rolled), the next was the fresh bast that i thigh rolled, the bottom piece is fresh bast that i used the reverse twist on.

When i got home, i put all three pieces on the window sill to see how they unravelled overnight as they dried, the results are as below

20180904_092018 by Mark D Emery, on Flickr

Top one with the bark on - more or less totally unravelled.
Middle one (Thigh rolled) - slight unravelling, but not too bad
Bottom one (reverse twist) - almost as good as it was before i went to bed.

Of course the one i forgot to do for direct comparison was bark on reverse twist

Just a bit of fun for my own personal interest and despite the shrinkage and unravelling, all these cords would be more than usable for the right application.

 

[Broch]

Thanks; that's a very useful comparison. I wonder, if the cord was put to use straight away (to lash some camp gadgets for example), would it make much difference to the construction?

 

[Kepis]

Thanks; that's a very useful comparison. I wonder, if the cord was put to use straight away (to lash some camp gadgets for example), would it make much difference to the construction?

probably not, will give it a go at some point though as i think it would be a worthwhile test, well unless someone else wants to give it a try first ;-)

 

[Robson Valley]

This can be a guiding principle. I used to have it stuck inside my briefcase in the years that I sat on a high budget Science Council.
Using his Po.st #9, Kepis already knows this ( I'd guess):

"Research is what you do when you realize that you can't go on doing things tomorrow as you are doing them today."

 

[Madriverrob]

Bush craft and Fishing ...............
Perfect ............

 

[Toddy]

A quick addition to this thread.

Three of the willows I grow for basketry were really in the way of my planting out stuff from my overcrowded greenhouse, so Himself cut them back.
Totally out of season for it, but I wasn't going to let them go to waste. So I de-leafed them and put those into the compost bins, and then I thought I might strip the bark, even if it wasn't brilliant I'd do something with it. Bark did not want to come off, it really didn't.
It was really sunny, and I was far too hot, so I left them sit on the path for an hour and came back out to them once the sun had moved round a bit.
Lo and behold the bark stripped off as cleanly as I have ever managed, from the butt to the very tip, it peeled off in three strips from every branch we had cut down Pretty much effortless. Didn't even need to use a knife. Just split the end of the bark with my thumbnail and gently kedged the first edges off, then it pulled as clean as a whistle.
Much chuffed, I now have a bucket load of bark drying off

So, out of season, let it wilt and try stripping it then and a bundle of peeled rods

 

[TLM]

How strong would that be in comparison to linden bast rope?

 

[Toddy]

It's oranges and apples.

The willow bast is superb wet. There's a coiled up ball of it still attached to a sunken log boat off the Danish coast. It'd be too expensive to lift the boat and it's preservation is fine just where it is. It is 'estimated' to be 2 - 3,000 years old (last I heard, conversation with fellow archeologists at the crannog a few years ago) and the cordage is still sound, still unmistakeably willow bast rope.

The best, and it is really, really beautiful stuff, natural rope from our western Europe/Scandinavia is that made from the bast of the small leafed lime. The Linden bast.
It is very strong, it has a lovely handle to it, doesn't carve up the hands, is very flexible and it wears well. It rots with exposure and use though. In time, and it's not so resistant to mildew as the willow.

Willow shoots every year and even the bast from those shoots makes good cordage. Willows will grow into trees (there's a fifty footer outside our fence line) but will happily survive browsed and coppiced as shrubs and be productive year after year after year.
Lime will coppice and it will do it well and it extends the life of the tree because it stops it maturing. For instance, there is a lime tree at Westonbirt Arboretum in Gloucestershire that is thought to be 2,000 years old. Better cordage is made from pollarded lime though, left to grow for five to ten years.

For those who had to make their own, I reckon it's basically what do you have? what can you find? what do you need ?

Fiona and I kind of challenged ourselves one year to see just how many native plants we could use to make decent rope. We were in the dozens by the season's end. Everything from elm bast to honeysuckle. They all work, and if made with care, they work very well indeed.

Climate plays a huge part in the lifespan and strength of a rope though. Even in the dry SA mountains their ropes eventually fail and need replaced. Nowadays we so rarely have any concept of natural lifespan of such things. In the past it must have been commonplace knowledge.