Post #532906 by coconuttzo on Fri, May 28, 2010 3:00 PM

Malo 'e tau lava mai he pongipongi faka'ofo'ofa ko eni.(Good beautiful mornin' to you all)

Everybody's been so busy doing what they love. I on the other hand have hardly done anything. It's been too long since I posted my last stuff I am actually embarassed to do so because so many of you have made more outstanding work. I've just been so busy with work & also added outrigger paddling to my regiment as a substitute for my lack of daily exercise. Doc says I need exercise but I can't afford exercise equipment, gym clubs are too expensive & runnin, walking around... boring. 'Nuff excuses though, here's what I've been doin' since last post...

I stained this Ku mask pendant in tea since the last pic, sanded it to bring out the high areas & restained it to give it that 'antiki' look. Buffed it up a bit & voila! 2"(51mm)L x 1 1/4"(32mm)W x 1/4"(6mm)thick.

My attempt at another one of my stylized manta rays, with carved eyes & a different tail design & stained in tea. I wasn't too happy with the tail look & the piece of bone I was working was too porous. I kept trying to carve it out but it just kept getting deeper & I was afraid it'd be too thin a piece. Then I stained it, big mistake, it just higlighted all the porous pits, it looked like it was a dirty piece. Oh what the heck, I might as well keep this for my personal use only unless somebody out there wants to buy it. Any takers? 1 3/4"(45mm)L x 1 7/8"(48mm)W straight line between each tip. 3/16"(5mm)thick.

This one I really like. It's 1 5/8"(42mm)L x 1 5/8"(42mm)W x 5/16"(8mm)thick. If you haven't guessed it yet, the hook is supposed to be the Taniwha's tongue lashing out.
This is my wife's favorite & I've received a lot of comments on it. Even little kids have walked up to me asking about it & where I got it from. They couln't believe that I had made it.
The only different thing that I did since last posting was that I inlaid it with Australian opal that I picked up at a swapmeet. It was already shaped perfectly so I didn't really do any shaping to it. It was like a match made in heaven. It was also pretty expensive though for it's size. It reflects some beautiful colors at every angle. Like specks of glitter were embedded within a crystal ball.
Then I buffed it up & strung it on an 8 plaited braid. The braid itself took me about a good 8 man hours total to create. I think that will be the last time I braid an 8 plait for a long while.

This here is a beautiful piece of Alaskan Woolly Mammoth bark ivory that I picked up from ebay. It was a pretty good bidding war, with $2 to spare, my highest bid was not beaten before the end. These pics are the pics from the ad itself(I forgot to take before pics when I received it). This is the hard outside bark layer of the extinct mammoth's tusk. It has mineralized ivory and brown colors mostly, with a layer of blue underneath and patches of blue closer to the surface. The patches of blue in the pics is what caught my eye. I just knew that this is a rare find in this type of material. This had a total length of 13 inches, with a thickness of 1/4th of an inch on most of the piece. This is at least 20,000 years old.

This is what it looked like after a whole days worth of sanding with an electric sander, 80 & 220 grit. Buffed it up a bit to see what other suprises I had. I liked the deeper valleys of the bark look so I didn't want to sand those out. I thought that that was a good call. What do you think?

My first piece out of the bark ivory, a toki. the toggle is also made of the same material(all my toggles are made of the same material as the pendant created). 3 11/16"(94mm)L x 1 3/16"(30mm)W x 1/4"(6mm)thick. I was stoked to see how the blue patches turned out. The contrast with the natural aged brown & the crevices of the bark came out perfectly. I couldn't ask mother nature for a more beautiful piece. Money well worth spent.
My wife wore this to work & told me how her co-workers were raving about it. They were amazed when shen told them I made it & what it was made from.

I wanted to make a makau(Hawaiian), matau(Maori), mata'u(Tongan), out of the same material but was torn at how much of the 'expensive' beautiful material would be wasted because of the negative space required for the traditional hook designs. My alternative was this simple koru design fit for a man yet elegant enough for a woman. 2 5/8"(68mm)L x 1 5/16"(33mm)W x 5/16"(8mm)thick.

Here's me sporting the hook the day I lashed it commemorating the day of our first outrigger paddling race in Kailua Kona. Received a few good comments from total strangers, now new friends with commissions.

another polished piece of fossil ivory.

Here's one that's not polished. It's just the outer layer, like a huge bone with about a 1/2"(12mm) thickness. It measures 6"(152mm) long x 4"(102mm) wide(semi-circle) I see a future tiki mask in this whole piece. I wonder how much that would fetch? Or just a bunch of pendants would fetch more. I think the latter, although a tiki mask would look so cool.

And finally, this is another koru designed matau of fossil ivory that I designed cut, sanded & polished this past Tue.(was my day off) & finished with the braiding & lashing yesterday. 2 1/8"(54mm)L x 1 7/16"(36mm)W x 7/16"(11mm)thick in the center.