Mammoth Ivory Ear Spoons and Sewing Needles

Well, I’m back from my latest trip – to Arizona. I’m down one boyfriend, but up one hobby. With the chaos of my breakup I’ve once again been bad about posting, but here are some images of what I’ve been spending my nervous energy on:

A couple of years ago I purchased a small bag of scrap mammoth ivory cut-offs at Pennsic, a large medieval event. I found the bag of ivory just before I left for Arizona, and I needed to switch things up when I got home, so I picked up some pieces and just started whittling. These are medieval style ear spoons and sewing/embroidery needles. The ear spoons are inspired by the ones shown in this image (from a book of Viking era finds that I have that’s in Russian, so I’m not sure of the details – I need to work on my Cyrillic).

I formed the ivory items using a few simple tools: my pocket knife, a set of small files from Harbor Freight, and an exacto knife (mostly for around the hole because it has a smaller blade than my pocket knife). I’ve already sold the smaller ear spoon, and plan on putting the larger one up for sale on my etsy site. They were fairly fun, if somewhat time consuming, so I’ll probably make a few more. 

Making Medieval Mirrors

Earlier this year at Estrella (a medieval reenactment war that takes place in Arizona in February) I got an inquiry about making some medieval glass mirrors to be placed in 13-15th century style pocket mirror cases. Like many people, I'd never herd of pre-renaissance glass mirrors, so was intrigued by the possibilities. I was spending the three weeks directly after that at the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York, and had access to their amazing research library. I proceeded to spend most of my non-work days closeted in the library, and a couple of surprised librarians helped me track down information on early glass mirrors.

Much to all of our surprise, it turns out that glass mirrors have been in use just about as long as there has been glass blowing. There are Roman references to producing mirrors from blown glass and tin or lead, and numerous small mirrors (such as the one at the left from Birka) and fragments have been found in Viking era graves.

The basic process of making glass mirrors is pretty simple - you have to put a metallic coating on the glass to make it reflective. Before the amalgamation technique was developed (a process developed in the renaissance requiring the use of mercury to mirrorize flat glass) this was done by blowing a large thin glass globe and pouring molten metal (lead or tin) inside of it while it was still hot. The tricky part comes in letting the glass cool down enough to have the lead or tin (which have a much lower melting point) stick to the glass rather than remain a moving liquid puddle without the glass cracking or popping off of the punty. Once the glass has been mirrorized it's broken free of the punty and allowed to cool and crack without annealing. This is why most pre-renaissance mirrors are also quite small, generally between around 2 and 6 cm.

So far in my experimentation I've managed to make several at least partially successful mirrorized globes, and have cut the fragments of these into viking style mirrors. As I do more experiments, I'm planning on refining the process for more consistent results and then also producing mirrors suitable for mounting in later period medieval pocket mirror cases. I'm also interested in mounting some of these as pendants. There is a reference to a mirror 'wrapped in silver wire' for use as a pendant that was found at Birka, and I would love any images or additional information anyone has on this.