Now here is an old project that needs finished, not sure if I like the rabbit motif so that may change when I scrimshaw it.
Back in the Ozarks the old gents would run their hounds at night, and they would use carved horns to work them and I suppose, to bring their dogs in.
The horns were pretty simple most of the time, not as elaborate as a powder horn for black powder guns. They were carved until they could make a decent sound and that is where it stopped.
Anyway, my Dad used to tell me about hunting raccoons at night with his uncles and what fun it was when he was a boy.
As part of one of my old jobs as a historic site interpreter, I became interested in powder horns and how to make them. A friend gifted some raw horns to me to work with, including this beautiful one which, after scraping it down with shards of glass from an old broken wine bottle, proved to have not two colors, but three.
I wasn’t trying to produce a historically accurate horn, obviously; of more interest to me was using horn as an art medium, and learning how to work it for pleasure. This was such a beautiful horn and the lightly textured satin look left by scraping it with the glass was so attractive that I thought it best to just try make a very special piece of art with it, perhaps learning enough in the process to tackle a traditional and accurate powder horn later on - if a well shaped one should turn up.
I have used it though unfinished to make a racket on New Years or to entertain kids.
Cattle horn can be carved, polished, made into cups, spoons, combs, or separated into thin sheets, thin enough to serve as little windows, plastic enough to be molded and bent with carefully applied heat. Heat is tricky; it softens the material but too much can scorch it, which smells like burning hair. It smells like that because in a way that is what horn is, a sort of tightly compressed hair.
A fellow site interpreter used to call it the plastic of its day.
—- Sue Walton