I found this stick in the gutter by my local park and took an interest in it because of the fork at one end. It kind of looked like an incomplete lacrosse stick or a slingshot with a really long handle. The end of the stick had a lot of damage from being exposed to the elements so I cut it off, which was about five inches. That made the stick shorter than I wanted but all I needed to do was seal a few splits in the wood with glue.
I chose not to decorate some areas of the stick with my Sharpie markers because I wanted to highlight the modifications I made to the stick. I had to patch this stick together with a lot of glue so I named it “Patchwork” and added decorative elements that signified putting things together like sewing and welding. The dark brown color came from a metallic-gold Sharpie that was almost out of ink. The sparkly bits were gone and the remaining ink acted like a stain rather than ink.
I was having difficulty filling in some of the gaps at the end of the fork so I used stamp ink. The ink was very smelly and it took several months to dissipate, even after coating the stick with polyurethane. I never used stamp ink on one of my projects again.