Bone, horn, and antler

• Bone
  • Bone working is an old craft to make a slight understatement. Many handsome items can be crafted from the bones of animals. Some examples include buckles, sewing needles, weaving tablets, whistles, dice, spoons, boxes, pendants, decrative pannels on things like crossbows, etc...
  • Bone is fairly easy to carve and work, and as a bonus is cheap or even free. Boneworking starts with cleaning up your materials. This can be done a few ways. First theres burying the bones and letting the soil microbes do the work for you, but theres the risk of local dogs or coyotes stealing it if it is not buryed deep enough. Secondly one can insert a few bones into a wood ant nest and allow the ants take care of the cleaning. Thirdly theres boiling. Where as the first two are better for those who are in no hurry for their materials this is a more involved method that doesn't involve waiting. First remove as much forign matter as you can from the bone. Next boil the bone and take care to keep it submerged at all times, if there are any unpleasent oders of too much humidity just crack a window or crank up the ventilation. An excellent page that describes how to carve bone can be found here.

A work in progress; will add more on antler and horn later-LY