Bespoke Post is a great way to indulge yourself with high-quality lifestyle enhancements. Bespoke Post is a men’s lifestyle subscription box offering sophisticated accessories, gear, and curated interest kits.
The monthly limited-edition boxes are built around a central, unique theme, and there are usually two or three new boxes to choose from every month. You can also skip the month if you’re not interested in any of the available boxes.
This month’s theme is CARVE.
DEAL: Save $9 on your first box with coupon code FREEBEER.
The front side of the card introduces the items included in this curation, providing product info and insight on why the items were chosen in the context of the current theme. This month revives the art of Scrimshaw, the whaling-age practice of carving ornate decorations into bone and setting the image with ink or oil.
The reverse side of the card always has the beginning of a useful article on some point of mastery related to the curation. Longer articles continue on the Bespoke site. This piece offers some pointers of making ensuring your knife stays in good enough condition to become an heirloom piece.
You also get a copy of Bespoke Post’s magazine, The Post. This is a new addition to the box, and it is intended to be a print version of the great content they have always offered digitally.
The inaugural issue of this magazine talks about how to survive the long and cold winter with sophistication. It features tons of short articles and info-graphics covering everything Bespokian – style, food, hobbies, potent potables.
Everything in the Bespoke Post CARVE Box.
Mollyjogger Scrimshaw Starter Lineup ($47.95): This kit contains everything needed to complete your very first scrimshaw project. Some sample designs are printed on transparency paper – these can be used right away – plus there are several other pics printed on a card for inspiration, or you can make your own. Detailed, step-by-step instructions are provided.
The scrimshaw tools — steel wool for prepping the surface, a pencil for sketching and tracing a design, transfer paper and a wooden transfer tool, the etching tool itself, and India ink for setting the design.
Bear & Son Barlow Knife ($27.95): A “one-armed bandit” knife with cowbone handle. This is one of several models of knife that might potentially be included in the kit, all made in the U.S.A. and intended to be heirloom quality.
The elegant design leaves plenty of room on each side for placing a design, with the remaining space occupied by a polished steel finish.
The sharp blade has the expected channel for opening, but this model also has a dulled, concave tip that allows for single-handed opening.
Even without further decoration, the knife has a lot of character.
I choose to make a beaver design, similar to the one on the card included in the kit (we kinda have a thing for beavers in our house). Unfortunately, the transfer paper didn’t work well for me on the bone. I think the steel wool was too gentle to properly prepare the dense bone. Sandpaper may have helped, but I didn’t want to risk marring the surface. I sanded the surface and tested some of the paper to make sure it worked, but the cow bone surface was too slick to hold any of the transfer– I ended up free-handing it. One side of the knife had bone with a warm, tawny tone, and the other was starker and grayed out – this, as well as a bit of extra room on the surface of the bone, inspired me to make a day and night side to the knife, reflecting the tireless, busy beaver.
The sunny side seemed to etch more easily than the other, requiring less effort and reworking. I exploited this quality to add contrasting styles to the complementary motifs, giving the sunny side a bright, clean line, and creating a hazy, shadowed look for the night version. The ink worked well for darkening the design. I liked that this art form doesn’t require any curing time or other rigid progressions, allowing one to do countless iterations and rework and re-ink the design as many times as desired. It can become whatever you want to make of it – either clean and simple or endlessly intricate.
Bespoke Post always has something interesting and unexpected, this box being one of the bigger surprises. It was lots of fun, and I am impressed that they found such a masculine and time-honored crafting activity to feature – no scrapbooking at Bespoke. The variety of offerings makes it an awesome monthly buy – I never get burned out because I can get clothing and gear one month, a hobby item the next, then some barware, etc., and I get to pick which boxes I want each month.
What did you think of the Bespoke Post CARVE box?
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