Bark Basket Part 1

Description

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The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

okay so we harvested this piece of bark off of a tulip poplar tree and I put a video of how this was harvested on the more a group page on Facebook pretty simple process in the spring to separate the bark from the SAP wood and you end up with the inner bark and the outer bark and now we can use this for container making knife sheath making it things like that I've kept this wet and put a weight on top of it like a rock you can put this in a creek or whatever and flatten it out and kept it wet until I was ready to use it because it was harvested yesterday now if I want to fold this into a simple container all I need to do is make sure that I start with a square this one's a little bit rectangle or excuse me a little bit obtuse here obtuse I guess isn't what I'm looking for in other words it's not a rectangle it's a little bit off on this side and that's not a major situation but if I wanted to trim that up I could bring my knife in and just trim that off to make sure that was closer to a rectangle shape like that I'd go off a little bit it's not that big of a deal all right now once we get that taken care of we really need to make our cuts to fold this into a container all we really need to do is cut through the outer bark on the back side but not cut through the inner bark and we need to find the centerline of this piece and so if we take this string and put it here and then fold it in half that's going to give us the centerline of the piece and we'll know that that's right here and that's basically where I want that line to meet on the other side as well so I can put another mark on this side real quick just like this and score the bark and I'll know where I need to meet with the eye that I'm going to cut four fold lines in this piece it's simplest way to do this is to find your marks

and coming here and the width of this I or this curve and I'm going to start really shallow with this curve and score so that I can fairly get them even and then I'm going to come over this side and do exactly the same thing and again I'm scoring very shallow the first time around and not going through anything to make sure that these lines meet up and make sure that I'm happy with the shape and all of those things because I really need them to meet this one meets and this one doesn't so I need to bring this in a little further this way like this and maybe bring this one in just a little further this way like this and now I can come in and score that down through the outer bark again you don't want to cut through the inner bark you don't have to get excited about this and necessarily do it all in one cut either what you're going to do is you're going to bend this like this slowly just like that on both sides if you didn't cut deep enough you're going to know it it cut deep enough you'll know that too and you can trim the corners later but you want these to meet fairly close you can pull them together in the end because you're going to sew this thing up when you're done and you'll be able to pull those corners together here and here all right as long as you met right there now when you get to this point you can look to see if your containers even if you need to cut some off you can but you don't have to do that right away what I like to do is kind of wet form this thing a little bit because I don't want to drill a bunch of holes in it while it's soaking wet because it tends to split this bark so what I do is I kind of come in here with a piece of string and I pull this thing to the point I want it and tighten it up just like this and then wrap it down so it does meet really really well just like that and then I can just half hitch it off and I'll let it dry like this for a while a few hours depending on the Sun you have until I can almost take this off and it kind of holds this shape the other thing that you can do is you can stuff this with a grassy material which is what I'm going to do some sedge grass that will help absorb some of that moisture and also act as a form all right so now I'm going to take some grass here and just water it up shove it inside here just like this and that's going to form that and the rope holds it in place while it's drying out and once it gets dried out a little bit we'll come back and drill and lace it we could use natural cordage for this I've got some right here that's the inner bark and we'll split that down later to use for the lacing