Notre Dame Fighting Irish Cane
The customer asked me to design a cane featuring various of the statuary and architectural elements of the Notre Dame University. The first photo shows me with the 3 inch thick maple "ball bat" that I sculpted the cane from, no sandwiched/glued together skinny boards, one solid chunk of wood. Happily, the customer like Antoni Gaudi's architecture in Barcelona Spain as well as I do, so I patterned the cane with it's oval porticos to receive the oval cartouches in the manner of Gaudi's amazingly original organic architecture. After I left 70 percent of the baseball bat on the floor as scraps, I then applied 23 karat gold leaf to all of the cartouches and then patinated them to make the images more easily visible, and that's all folks!!!