Travis, congratulations to both you and Michelle. I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but with the medical process Julia and I went through we ended up with twins, a boy and a girl. They were introduced to camping at a very young age of two months. They grew up with camping, and both are still avid campers at the ripe old age of 25 (will be 26 the end of May). I can still picture them laying there in the little plastic "seats" on top of the picnic table just absolutely fascinated by the tree tops gently moving in the breeze.
My point in this rambling is to say, don't be afraid to introduce your new addition to the family to the outdoors at a very young age. You'll never regret it. Matthew and Jessica are the quiet and shy type around people, but when it comes to the outdoors they are the ones among their age group that really know their way around.
By the way, Gladstone is just 60 miles north of me. I don't know much about custom knife makers, and never had heard of Shane Sibert. So I looked him up online. Yes, he is in Gladstone. On his homepage he states that he's so far behind in his orders, about a year, that he's currently not taking any orders until he's caught up.
This post is getting a bit long, but since you are into knives I've got a story for you about knives, steak knives made from elk shin bones.
Probably almost twenty years ago I went to Eastern Oregon on an elk hunt with some friends. While there we ran into a guy who lived nearby where we were hunting in a little wide spot in the road named Seneca. This guy grew up very close to where my friends and I lived here close to the town of Albany, and knew people that my friends knew.
So, after spending time talking, he told us about his elk shin bone steak knives and invited us to come to his place to see them. The handles were deer and elk antler sections, the blades were shin bones split, dried, and then shaved to uniform thickness and then shaped. He used tendons from deer and elk shins to bind the blade to the handle.
Then he would take deer antlers, cut slots in the beams for the knives to fit into, and either configure them to hang on the wall, or set on a table top as a center piece. The workmanship was astounding. I wish I could have afforded a set, but as I remember his asking price for a set of six, with the antler base, was $600. Too much for my income. I was wishing I had a camera with me as the guy was a real craftsman with wood also.
Don
My point in this rambling is to say, don't be afraid to introduce your new addition to the family to the outdoors at a very young age. You'll never regret it. Matthew and Jessica are the quiet and shy type around people, but when it comes to the outdoors they are the ones among their age group that really know their way around.
By the way, Gladstone is just 60 miles north of me. I don't know much about custom knife makers, and never had heard of Shane Sibert. So I looked him up online. Yes, he is in Gladstone. On his homepage he states that he's so far behind in his orders, about a year, that he's currently not taking any orders until he's caught up.
This post is getting a bit long, but since you are into knives I've got a story for you about knives, steak knives made from elk shin bones.
Probably almost twenty years ago I went to Eastern Oregon on an elk hunt with some friends. While there we ran into a guy who lived nearby where we were hunting in a little wide spot in the road named Seneca. This guy grew up very close to where my friends and I lived here close to the town of Albany, and knew people that my friends knew.
So, after spending time talking, he told us about his elk shin bone steak knives and invited us to come to his place to see them. The handles were deer and elk antler sections, the blades were shin bones split, dried, and then shaved to uniform thickness and then shaped. He used tendons from deer and elk shins to bind the blade to the handle.
Then he would take deer antlers, cut slots in the beams for the knives to fit into, and either configure them to hang on the wall, or set on a table top as a center piece. The workmanship was astounding. I wish I could have afforded a set, but as I remember his asking price for a set of six, with the antler base, was $600. Too much for my income. I was wishing I had a camera with me as the guy was a real craftsman with wood also.
Don
