How to Make a Shepherd's Shrink Cup, Part 6 (Brass Hoop)

Caution! You can easily cut your hands on brass sheets, so it's better to use gloves.
Cut 1cm strip from 0,4mm thick brass sheet. You can also use copper sheets instead of brass. I've also seen one shepherd's cup with a grey metal hoop (maybe iron or pewter). The brass hoop can be decorated with engraved patterns but that's another craft altogether, so you may just leave it as it is.
The ends of the hoop may be fastened with rivets and hidden inside the handle. Sometimes they are fixed to the handle with small brass or iron nails. And sometimes there are more nails fixing the hoop to the cup itself. If you are afraid that the nails may cause the cup to crack, you can fix the hoop without nails like this:

If you want to use rivets, wind the brass strip tightly around the cup and through the hole in the handle. Cut it so that the ends overlap about 0,5 cm. Mark the overlapping parts with a thin marker. If the brass strip is too hard and it cannot be tightened around the cup properly, then subtract about 1mm from the measured length. Then drill the holes. I found that mechanical hand drill works best for this.

Fit the rivets into the holes and cut them so that about 1mm is sticking out. Put the hoop on a metal surface and peen the rivets gently.

Hide the rivets inside the handle and slip the hoop on the cup.

Instead of a metal hoop, you can also use wooden hoop. You can easily create one from a hazel sunshoot if you split it and carve it from both sides until just a thin slice remains (some basket makers have a special tool for it). Then flex the hoop carefully around the cup. Carve an oblong hole on one end like this: 

Then wrap the hoop around the cup (with the handle in place) and mark a line on the opposite end. Add two skew lines and cut off the resulting triangles on both sides. Then taper both ends as thin as you can.

Feed the end of the hoop into the hole and put the finished wooden band onto the cup. If it is too small, adjust the hole a little. When the hoop dries, it contracts a bit, so it should hold tightly. It can also be fixed with a tiny wooden peg. You can prepare more hoops in advance and boil them before using.

Finally you can decorate the cup itself. It is common to carve the lower rim and sometimes also a decorative strip below the upper rim. I would leave the rim itself undecorated because it's more comfortable for drinking that way.

That's all for now. It is not more difficult than other carving projects, it just takes an awful lot of time. If you decide to try it, let me know how it turned out!

<< Part 5

How to Make a Shepherd's Shrink Cup, Part 5 (Handle)

When the cup is dry, inspect it closely. If the bottom fits nicely, no light is showing through and the walls did not crack, you can celebrate it properly. It is normal if the cup leaks a bit at this stage. It can be fixed when you finish the cup to protect it from moisture. Traditional shepherd's shrink cups are finished with lard but you can probably use oil or beeswax. The remaining gaps will be filled gradually with milk proteins because shepherd's shrink cups were used mainly for drinking acidophilous milk.
Before applying the lard, first finish the outer walls and taper the rim, so that it fits the mouth nicely while drinking.

Melt the lard in a saucepan - it doesn't have to be very hot, just make it liquid. You need about a teaspoon of lard for one shrink cup. Pour the melted lard into the cup and back to the pan so that all the walls are greased. Wipe off the rest with a paper towel and let it set for several days in a warm place. Some shepherd's shrink cups were smoked to have a nice color and last longer. Some of them turned completely black after a long time and repeated smoking.
Then you just need to carve a handle. You can use any hard and durable wood (like fruitwood or maple) and choose whatever decoration you like. Personally I consider many current shepherd's shrink cups overdecorated. And I also think that the handle should be comfortable to hold.
Prepare a board about 1,5 cm thick. Drill a hole as wide as the thickness of the cup's rim about 0,5 cm from the side. Then carve the side like this:

Extend the hole downwards so that you create a hook which will hold on the cup's rim.
The side of the handle should be slightly concave to fit well on the round side of the cup. You can do it with a carving gouge or a spoon knife. Also chamfer the inside of the hook. Try to put it on the cup (mark the exact place where it fits best) and gradually adjust the hook. If you carve it well, the handle will hold more or less tightly on its own.

Draw the pattern of the handle and cut out the basic shape with a fretsaw. If you don't have one or if you are as clumsy with a fretsaw as me, you can drill a few holes in proper places and remove the wood around them with a knife.
If the handle is wide and heavy, it should reach down for better stability. Also make it fit nicely in your hand and taper the corners.
Make a thin hole on the lower end where the handle meets the cup. You'll spread the brass hoop there. All the cylindrical cups have the brass hoop fixed a little above the bottom of the cup, which gives you an opportunity to decorate the lower rim.
Next time we will tinker at some metalworking.

<< Part 4  |  Part 6 >>

How to Make a Shepherd's Shrink Cup, Part 4 (Fitting the Bottom)

Let's continue with the most difficult and risky part. It's necessary to carve a groove with uniform depth on a hardly accessible inner wall of the cylinder. The groove should be (thickness of the bottom piece)+(depth of the groove) from the bottom, so in my case 5mm+1,7mm. You can use a drawing compass to draw the line:

The groove can be cut with a small knife or a gouge. It will not be perfectly horizontal but it doesn't need to be. It is better to cut the groove slowly with several turns. You can draw a line on the blade with a thin marker as far from the tip as the depth of the planned groove, so that you don't cut deeper than necessary.

Draw a few pencil marks as far from the thin groove as the depth, towards the bottom of the cup. Then take a small pocket knife or a 3mm carving gouge and cut diagonally at 45 degrees towards the groove. Also this can be done slowly and gradually. The groove will show you exactly when to stop cutting.

When the groove is ready, prepare material for the bottom - a straight plank of softwood (spruce or pine) at most 0,5 cm thick. Softwood can be compressed a little, so the risk of cracking the cup while drying is lower.
Trace the inside of the cup onto the board and add a guide line on both the cup and the bottom, so that you know how exactly to fit the bottom back. Add another line around it using the same distance as the depth of the groove.

Cut the bottom with knife or saw. If the bottom is too wide somewhere, sand it off with coarse sandpaper, because it's easy to cut off too much with a knife. Then cut away the lower corner by 45 degrees. The bottom should look like this:

Put the cup (without the bottom!) into a pan with water and boil it. Then turn off the cooker and weigh down the cup so that it is submerged. Porous woods will soak quickly while dense and hard woods will take longer time. Some pieces will be ready in 10 minutes while others (like fir burls) must be boiled for hours.
Pull the cup out occasionally, dry it and try to put the bottom into the cup. Use the guide lines to align it properly. If the bottom seems just a tiny bit larger than necessary, then it is in fact the right moment. Put one end into the groove and use brute force to push the other end in. If you do it right, the bottom will snap in nicely and loudly.
(If you were not lucky and the bottom split, you can still carve another and have a second try.)
Wrap the cup into a piece of cloth or paper and let it dry slowly. Check the drying cup from time to time.

<< Part 3  |  Part 5 >>

How to Make a Shepherd's Shrink Cup, Part 3 (Hollowing)

There are three types of shepherd's shrink cups that differ in the shape of the cup and also the way of attaching the handle. I will describe shepherd's shrink cups from central Slovakia region where the handle is attached with a hook on its upper part and a brass hoop on its lower part. I consider it the least difficult option concerning both materials and methods.
So what tools do you need?

• saw
• something for drilling (the wider drill the better)
• knife
• gouge (straight, with U-shaped edge, but not too deep, about 2cm wide) 
• straight edge gouge 3mm wide
• (optional) coarse sandpaper
• metal cutting shears and small hammer (only if you want to use a brass hoop)
• patience (lots, you'll really need it)

First you have to select an appropriate piece of wood. Maple is the best option but you can also use alder or birch. If you have neither, you can try another hardwood (for example I successfully made experimental mini-cups from willow). Choose a log which is at least 10 cm long and wide, without knots and side branches because they would complicate the hollowing. The log must be green and processed immediately, so that it has no time to crack.
Peel the selected log and drill a hole through the center. I tried to use a 2 cm wide drill bit with a corded drill but it was quite hard and slow work. Then I bought an auger and it was much faster. But I'm not saying that you must buy an auger too. You can also drill more narrow holes side by side and remove the wood between them with a gouge.

If you have some powerful tool, drill or lathe that can make 6-10 cm wide hole, don't hesitate and use it. Ideally the hole should be as wide as the inside of the cup. In such case you are done with hollowing. If the hole is more narrow, you must carve away the remaining wood with a knife, spoon knife or carving gouge. And do it quickly before the wood dries because dry wood is much harder.

If you use a spoon knife, the inside of the cup will be uneven despite the best effort. Then it may happen that you will carve the bottom according to the lower rim, but the groove will be a few milimeters above it and the bottom won't fit there.

If you carve the inside with a knife, the inner walls probably won't be smooth. There will be scratches because of the angle between the knife and the inner wall.

I recommend to hollow with any tool that works well for you and to finish the inner walls with a carving gouge. Of course you can use the gouge all the time, with a mallet or without it. The gouge on the picture below is too deep for this and you would do much better with a shape more similar to the inside curve of the cup.
I've seen even better hollowing tool (from a shrink cup maker Miroslav Barnišin), but I don't know where to get something like it.

Finally measure the diameter of the cup and write it down together with the exact spot where you measured it because the log is not a perfect circle. Then leave the cup dry for at least two weeks and then measure again. Divide the difference by two and you will get the depth of the groove.

For example my experimental willow mini-cup shrank from 7,352 cm to 6,99 cm, so the groove should be just around 1,7 milimeter. For normal-sized shrink cups (8-9 cm in diameter) you can use standard depth 2mm and leave out the exact measuring.

<< Part 2  |  Part 4 >>

How to Make a Shepherd's Shrink Cup, Part 2 (Sources)

There is an excellent book about shepherd's cups here. It contains lots of pictures, something from history and some interesting things about the symbolic meaning of traditional decoration patterns used on the shepherd's cups.
A few old articles and some videos can be also found online (in Slovak):

• http://www.muzeumpd.sk/buxus/docs/CRPAK_Exponat.pdf - some details about making the cups
• http://www.stieranka.sk/riad.htm - a nice comparison of various regional types of shepherd's cups
• https://mynovohrad.sme.sk/c/5051055/crpaky-z-klenovca-poznaju-aj-v-zahranici.html - an article about Milan Stieranka, shepherd's cup maker who owns the website above
• https://tv.sme.sk/v/24596/rezbar-z-nudze.html - a video about an old shepherd who carves shrink cups as an additional source of income

I also discovered shrink pots which are similar to shepherd's shrink cups, but without handle. This craft is not so carefully guarded, so you can actually find some online instructions:

• https://davidffisherblog.wordpress.com/2016/02/13/the-magic-of-a-shrink-box/
• https://davidffisherblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/making-a-shrink-box1.pdf
• http://seanhellman.blogspot.sk/2011/05/shrink-pot-and-shrink-pot-croze.html 

And there is a nice video here (choose "Swedish shrink box" from the list of episodes):
http://www.pbs.org/woodwrightsshop/watch-on-line/watch-season-episodes/2016-2017-episodes/
But don't take this video too seriously. In fact, hollowing a shrink pot is not as easy as it seems. After a while you'll start feeling some muscles that you didn't even know you had. 
Compared to a shrink pot, a shepherd's cup must be watertight, so the groove and the bottom must be made very precisely. In the next part I'll tell you what I've learned, so that you don't have to repeat the same mistakes. If you know something more, you can write me a comment.

<< Part 1  |  Part 3 >>

How to Make a Shepherd's Shrink Cup, Part 1 (Or How It Crossed My Mind)

I went to Craftsmen days festival a few years ago and I noticed an amazing shepherd's shrink cup with a dragon head on the handle (these cups were traditionally used on mountain sheep farms for drinking žinčica, a drink from sheep milk whey). They are usually decorated with figures of sheep, shepherds or bears, but I consider dragons much more cool. I didn't buy the cup, it was quite expensive - but I noticed that the bottom was from a different piece of wood, fitting so tightly that it was waterproof. And I tried to find out how it was made.
The maker's wife told me that the cup must be boiled in hot water to expand. A bottom from dry wood is inserted into a groove inside. When the wood dries, the cylinder shrinks tightly around the bottom.
I thought I could try it someday, so I asked how long the wood must be boiled, but the maker's wife didn't know. And when I asked her husband the same question, he looked at me like "You want to steal my trade secrets!" and he gave me very evasive answers.
But he had no idea what a stubborn person he'd just met.
So I tried to search on the internet... and I found nothing. Only much later I realized why there were no online instructions. The shepherds have always learned the carving skills personally, from one generation to another. Even today's makers learned their craft directly from the old masters. And no one ever realized that it could be done otherwise. After all, most of them don't even have their own website, not to mention facebook or instagram. So the whole craft of making shepherd's shrink cups is practically ignored by a new generation of people who find everything online.
And I think it's about time to change it.

Part 2 >>