A Sterkarm Handshake: How to Make One by Susan Price


It was birthday earlier this month.

Here's my birthday present from my younger brother and sister: Adam the ambulance worker and silver-smith-cartoonist and Patti, the cat-scan, x-ray and MRI scan operator, camera-woman and charming hostess.

There's an unexpected use of vinegar and hard-boiled eggs.

Creating the Sterkarm Badge



The pesky new posting board for Blogger won't, as far as I can find out, allow me to preview the video. If it won't play, follow this link:--

https://youtu.be/noTUQ42zNgw

Haven't managed to meet up with Adam and Patti yet but I'm delighted with my birthday present and look forward to being able to display my gratitude to the Sterkarm Riding Family whose reiving has kept me in whisky for a good many years.



Susan Price has won the Carnegie Medal, the Guardian Fiction Award and has twice been short-listed for the Whitbread.


Comments

sandra horn said…
Spellbinding! It did play, too, with music! What a brilliant present - Happy Birthday, belatedly!
Bill Kirton said…
Inspired and inspiring.
(A wee footnote, any significance in the fact that Adam's left-handed?)
What a present!
Peter Leyland said…
That was a really mesmerising bit of creativity with fantastic background music.

Thanks also for the notes on the blog posting which is new to me.
Susan Price said…
Thank you all.
Bill, there is a streak of left-handedness in my family. Adam and our paternal aunt are both strongly left-handed. I always regarded myself as right-handed, but was talking with a teacher who specialised in dyslexia and adult literacy and to my surprise, she told me that I qualified as ambidextrous because, she said, I often used my left hand simply because it happened to be nearer to the task or because my right hand was already in use. Strongly right-handed people, she said, don't do this.

It seems that left-handedness, dyslexia and ambidextrousness are often inherited and there is some mild dyslexia in my family too. -- A long-winded way of saying, yes, this is why I was attracted by the legend of the Kerrs being so left-handed that they built their castle stairs to wind the opposite way to everyone else.
Jan Needle said…
Brilliant that, Sue. Sadly the only thing I inherited from my family seems to have been half-wittedness, Me mum did warn me!
Eden Baylee said…
How fabulous, what a superb gift. Happy belated birthday Susan!
xo
eden
Umberto Tosi said…
I loved this. Thank you for sharing your sister and brother's extraordinary gift. I hope you had as happy a birthday as this augured! Did Adam and Patti come up with the idea of curing the silver shield with chopped hard-boiled eggs? Or was this a long-ago discovery made by a smith's naughty daughter who dropped her silver pendant into the king's egg salad to hide it from the jealous queen, and found it had turned purple when she fished it out of her sandwich later?
Fascinating video... is that the 'lost wax' process known from ancient times? Your brother is so talented, and I love that badge! (Can we buy replicas on amazon???)

What I want to know is, did he eat the eggs afterwards?