This is one of my favorite walking sticks. It is made from a willow branch and I found it in a discard pile of tree trimmings at my local park. I asked the maintenance crew (?) if it would be ok to take a few sticks and they didn’t seem to care. Most of the sticks were hacked up by their trimmers and chainsaws but this one stick managed to come out in decent condition. 

I trimmed and sanded off all of the small shoots and used my Dremel tool to even out the surface. I started decorating the stick on Halloween so I went with a red/orange/yellow/black color palette. My tools of choice were brush tip Sharpie markers. It took me exactly 12 hours to finish the designs because I was watching a Law & Order marathon on TV and had watched 12 episodes.

I sprayed the stick with a couple coats of polyurethane and attempted to sand the surface before adding additional coats, but my sandpaper went too far and stripped off some of the color in a few places. I had to reapply the color before adding more coats of polyurethane.

I chose the name “Night Roil” based on the themes of Halloween. People come out at night to trick-or-treat and a “roil” is to disturb something like the earth or water. In my context, I use “roil” to mean a disturbance of the spirits or disturbing people on one particular night of the year and demanding candy.

Back