The small sized objects such as distaffs, hatchets, clubs and dippers (also known as the forester's cup) belong, unlike the big ones made of carved wood (gates, pieces of furniture), to a special category of folk art, as their authors are no specialized artisans. This is one more reason to admire the artistic shapes of such objects which show nothing but talent, skill and the particular resourcefulness specific to Romanians.

The material of which the dippers, as well as the other objects of personal use are made and over which the peasant artisans bend themselves with minuteness and talent, should have certain properties making it easy to process so as to reach the desired artistic shape; it is thus necessary that the wood fibre should be soft, allowing for subtle decoration techniques (incision, cutting up, excision, indenting, scratching, etc.), but it should also be elastic, so that the ornaments could gather relief and be resistant in time. Therefore no fir-tree wood is used, because it is rigid, the most suitable materials being the sycamore wood and alder-tree one.

The most favoured ornamentation register includes:

• the handle, decorated with a central motif: the cross window, the cut up cross or the solar symbol, also cut up;
• the stand, on which the same motifs are repeated, inlaid this time;
• the dipper body, especially the crescent-like ones, on which the pattern on the handle or the stand is continued; in this case, the decoration is modified, the geometrical and religious motifs being replaced by naturalist (leaves, flowers, branches, deers, stags) or anthropomorphic ones.

On certain dippers the owner's name and the year of manufacture are carved or, even though less frequently, they are decorated with sculptures similar to a real coat of arms: when worn at the belt, they represent the owner's mark of prestige, revealing the way in which the Romanian forester or shepherd imagines his relationship with the surrounding world.

Dippers, Transylvania (Hunedoara), beginning of the XXth century

Last update: 2003, March 25
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