Make Willow Bark Cordage

Welcome to another video from Far North Bushcraft and Survival. Glad you could join me. I'm Lonnie and behind the camera is my wife Connie and first of all I'd like to thank all of my subscribers and viewers. You guys are awesome. I thank you for all the comments. I read each and every one of them and I appreciate it. Those comments are, they're encouraging. I enjoy them. Okay, this video is going to be about making natural cordage from willow, willow bark. Using willow bark. We've got a willow here and what we want in this area, the willows are pretty gnarly and messed up down near their bases. But as you get up higher, quite often you'll have longer, straighter shoots with fewer knots and smooth bark. So I've got a piece that should be just about right for our needs. I'll go ahead and cut it down. Okay, when you're, when you're gathering this, you have the sticks to get the bark from. The longer, the better. Smoother, the better. No branches. But we're gonna, we're just gonna make a short bit of bark here for the purpose of the video. So this will be more than plenty. Now on this step, it's the inner bark of the willow that you want and with this variety of willow, the outer bark is real thin and it's difficult to get off and the easiest way I've found to get it off is to just scrape it, scrape it off. This is my, this is my saw that I'm using here to to get the bark off. Now there's lots of things you can use if you know, if you don't happen to have a saw like this. Here's my Swiss Army knife, the Trekker model. The back of its saw blade works well. Also, a lot of, the back of a lot of knives work well. Somebody recently asked in one of my videos what knife was this. This is a Mora 911 if that makes any difference to you. All right, and this works excellent, the back of it. You try to use the blade and chances are you're gonna cut too deep and take off too much. You want just barely the dark bark to be taken off. There'll still be some green on here, that's okay, that won't hurt anything. So I'm gonna continue to strip this bark off here and I'll come back when I've got it all done. I failed to mention that this is a requested video and I'm just getting around to doing it now. Okay, now what we do is we put a, we slip through that inner bark all the way down. Run it a couple times, make sure that we're all the way through the bark. Do that from end to end and then we start peeling the bark up. You get, you don't get in a hurry here, you just start working it, carefully working it around. Springtime and summer, earlier summer is the time to do this when the sap is flowing good. Once you get into later summer or autumn it's too late to do it this way. I won't go in, you can still accomplish it, but I won't go into that at this time. I may do another video on that process some other time. All right, there we go. Beautiful sheet of bark to work with. Now just as a side note, this nice clean white stick, it's all covered with sap and it's pretty tasty stuff. It's very sweet. So I guess I better quit licking on that and go on with this. Okay, now what I do is I start tearing about a quarter inch thick or so. It depends on your size of the rope, the finished product you want to end up with. And it also, the wider you go, the harder it is going to be to to twist it. So you don't want to go too wide. So we'll be using about a quarter of an inch thick here. Okay, as you can see this is getting a little wider. So what I'm going to do with that is I'll start back on this end, I'll split it again. And of course it's going to run out here at some point, but that's okay. We've got plenty of bark here to work with. Okay, now I'm just going to continue on with this until we've got quite a pile stripped off and ready. And you just carry on the same way, making it however thick you want to make it. Traditionally the First Nations people would, they would gather all the bark that they thought they would need during the spring and the summer. And they wouldn't have to process it all up. They would gather it up and then just store it, let it dry. And then during the winter when when the hunting was all done and they were all, things were less stressful, then they would get this out and they would continue on with it and make up the rest of their cordage. So that's what we're going to do with this. Now we've got our our bark, inner bark, all stripped out and separated into the width that we want. Now we can weave it up just like it is into cordage. And it's okay, this is cordage that was done that way. It's okay for purposes that aren't going to move. But as you can see, this is not very flexible. And if you were to flex this it would break. You could use this by wetting it down again and then tying up your project, allowing it to dry. But if that project is to flex, then this is going to break. So this is what what it's like once you do the next step. And what that next step is, this is what it's like after you've performed that next step and then made cordage from it. So what that next step is, is we're gonna boil this in some water and some ashes, campfire ashes. Boil it for about an hour and then okay, that should, after an hour that'll be fixed up pretty good. That should be sufficient. We've got our fire going here and it's ready to cook. Okay, I put them in the teapot here and I boiled it for a couple hours, two hours with the ash. Good, good handful of ash in there with it. After that I dried it and that's been several days ago. So now let's take some and I'll show you what to do with it now. Okay, now you need to dip it in water again. Okay, not very long because you don't want it to really soak up the water. Just want it to get damp, get a little a little easier to work. Okay, once it soaks up a little bit of water, you start twisting. Okay, let me start twisting down here a little bit. Okay, all right. Right now we don't want to twist the ends. Okay, once you've got it twisted up there pretty good, twist it. Keep twisting it here. Offset it. Don't put it right in half. Offset it a little bit and you'll see why in a little bit. Twist it until it wants to double over on itself like that. Okay, that's the beginning of your rope. So now if you're wearing a type of pants, type of material that will allow you to do this, it really speeds up things to be able to twist it on your on your pants like this. Make sure each strand is good and twisted individually and then twist them both together. Hopefully you can see that real good. Okay, make sure each strand is twisted good individually and then twist them together and then help it along. Okay, we're getting pretty close here. We'll go ahead and splice in another piece. And this is how you do the splice. We gotta soak it. Okay, again just just a little bit. Okay, then you lay this alongside of the other one. Leave a little bit sticking beyond here. Lay it alongside the other one and start twisting it. Those two. Twist those two together. Okay, you want to come up here closer sweetheart. Okay, once again, you know, twist up each individual cord and then twist them together. Okay, that's not rolling real good. Okay, I'm gonna back off and do this by hand. And how you do it by hand is you twist. Hold it. Twist this one. Rotate them. Twist this one. Rotate it. Twist this one. Rotate it. Twist this one. Rotate it. Okay, that'll make a good strong joint there by overlapping them that far. Okay, and then we'll go back to our rolling on the knee like we were doing. We're at a friend's campsite right here. And so we're just enjoying this site and making up this cordage while we're here. So it really doesn't take that long to make. Especially if you can roll it on your on your knee like that. Now that you've got it to this point, now you see why. See, it's time to splice in another one. Another piece. And now you see why we staggered the ends. Why we didn't put both ends together originally. It's because we spliced in one here and now we'll splice in the other one here. That's to keep them from splicing both of them in at the same place making a weaker cord. Okay, so to continue on you just splice in another one just like we did here. Continuing on as long of a cordage you want to make. It doesn't matter how long. Okay, now once you get done, you can snip these off. These tag ends. And okay, once this is dry, completely dry, it helps to run this whole cord through the fire. Through a flame, you know, like a, you know, a lighter or something. Just to clean up all the rough pieces sticking out and these tag ends here. And once it's all finished, it helps just to roll the whole thing on your pants or a flat surface. Just roll the whole thing just to get everything all smoothed out. And once you're done, you have a really a pretty good looking cord. And it's actually pretty strong. Now if you want a stronger cord with this size material, what you can do is again, just like you did originally, twist it until it forms a knot, until it forms a loop. And then just continue to twist like you did originally and fold. Except now it's backwards from the way you did it before. And you'll have one, you'll have a cord that's twice as strong. Okay, well, thanks for watching and we'll catch you on the next video.