OLD VERSUS NEW

My belief is years ago the reason that crafters used crate wood and cigar boxes often times was because of the type of wood that was used in those items.  What is crate wood?  Crate wood is basswood it is one of the softest wood you can find. It was very easy to use a pocketknife to cut V’s into the wood.  Also it was very easy to rip down to make the layers. Try to do that with  maple, oak, or even pine and it is much more difficult if not impossible. Keep in mind, the fragility of pieces made from basswood that are about 100 years old will most likely be in poor shape just because of decomposition.

Look at this piece;   trying to keep up with the tramp art world, in the beginning, I purchased cigar boxes off of E bay. I went to the local Home Improvement store and bought some basswood so that I could make pieces LOOK old.  For a short period of time, I was able to move pieces through auctions because people THOUGHT they were old. They were going like hotcakes until it came to the attention of a buyer that they were NEW.  Would you have guessed looking at this picture?? That’s the problem today; perception and reality are two different things

Here was a repair piece that was brought to me. It is an urn.  This is an antique piece of tramp art the reason I say this is because it came to me in about 6-8 pieces.  My task was to put it back together, which was a job let me tell you. It goes to my point that the old pieces are fragile. They just start falling apart. Out of the many pieces I repaired this was one of my favorites because it wasn’t caked with layers of who knows what, stain, shellac, or linseed oil.  Obviously my job in repairing the old pieces was to make them look as original as possible. I had to match the V’s in that particular piece. I had to match the shape of the layers for example a base may have been rounded with v’s in it so I had to make something that would match and then notch it out.  The biggest challenge was matching the color of  pieces. I used a variety of techniques to get the desired effect basically whatever it took.  The mediums I used were stain, oil based paints, linseed oil, amber shellac, and my favorite thing to make it appear old was “Magic Dust”.  What is Magic Dust you ask, vacuum cleaner dust. It makes a piece look old real quick. My point is be careful there are many tricks to make the new pieces look old and antiques out there that were totally restored NOT original pieces.

This was my most challenging repair piece. This is what is known as crown of thorn.  It did have a nice original finish on it until I re-stained it at the dealer’s request. The piece came to me in a shambles the base was broken off, the neck was broken, and the shade was not assembled to the lamp. The piece could not even stand on it’s own when it came to me. This is why you see it sprawled across my workbench. I didn’t even think it was salvageable. The piece was in such disrepair that it took me about 4 months, a few hrs a day probably, to get the piece back together. Crown of thorn is like a puzzle with individual sticks of wood that interlock together. This is the challenge to make the puzzle fit together. This art form is further lost than tramp art in that you would starve making it.  A simple frame can have close to 1000 separate pieces so think how much time the original crafter spent making this lamp.

      Here is what the piece looked like when I completed it. Big change!                                                                                        

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