I spent part of August slowly carving a mouse. I wasn’t especially happy with it, but it was too good to throw away, so I gave the mouse a leather tail and stood him on a piece of cholla cane I mounted to a chunk of wood that I had quickly carved round-ish.
With all the pieces in place, I like the results a lot better, similar to how sometimes a photo doesn’t look “right” until it’s been framed.
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Over the past few months, I’ve been working on this plate. It’s made from sweet gum that a friend sent me. I started with a piece that was roughly 12 inches square (300mm) by 3 inches thick (75mm). I finished with a plate that is just under 12 inches in diameter, and about an inch thick, and which isn’t quite flat. Sweet gum moves a lot as it dries, and I didn’t account for this movement in my initial turning.
The thickness of the plate itself is under a quarter inch (6mm), probably closer to ⅛ inch at the thinnest spot, but I don’t have a caliper that can measure it accurately.
But I think the plate is finally done. The finish is tung oil and shellac, applied by french polishing, after a number of initial coats of oil. It’s food safe, but I don’t know that anyone will ever eat from this plate.
In my numbering of turned bowls, this is number 48.
This plate was large enough that I needed to turn the head of my lathe and work with the plate parallel to the ways of the lathe, rather than the usual perpendicular arrangement.
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A friend of mine in Virginia sent me some wood recently, which included a blank of “definitely not mulberry,” which he had picked up somewhere. It had pretty grain, but he hasn’t been turning a lot of bowls lately, so he passed it along to me.
It took me a few days to find the right shape for the bowl within the blank. I started by getting it close, but with ½ inch thick walls, and then staring at it while I figured out what shape it needed to be.
Once I decided that I wanted a defined rim on the bowl, I finished thinning the walls (to a little under ⅜ inch, or 9mm), mostly hollowing them from the inside, though cutting the rim from the outside. I had a tiny bit of chip-out right near the transition from heartwood to sapwood, but decide to leave it, rather than removing the rim I’d made, which is a good feature of the bowl.
Finish is a couple coats of tung oil, some shellac, and Ack’s Finishing Paste. The bowl is about 7 inches in diameter, and 4½ inches tall.
I’m pretty happy with this one, and my sweetie thinks it’s a “keeper,” which means we need to find a place to display it. I guess there are worse problems to have.
#woodworking #woodturning #bowl
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I had a few white oak offcuts (or off-turnings) from another project I'm working on. Was wondering what I could do with them when a friend of mine told a story about her sister (who was a little bit crazy) sending her a piece of cake from Japan to the US. Apparently it was intact when it arrived at her house, but a month in the mail had allowed time for some mold and such to grow.
Anyway, I decided I could send her a wooden donut. It's gluten free, no carb, high-fiber, vegan, and best of all won't spoil in the mail!
White oak with fake frosting and clay sprinkles.
Mmmmm… donut!
#woodworking #woodturning #art
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My third bowl made from cholla and epoxy. I laid the cholla canes in flat, rather than standing on end, and poured multiple colors of epoxy, tilting the blank a different direction with each pour. The bowl is just over 9 inches in diameter, and just under 2 inches high (so it probably is more of a plate than a bowl).
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My second bowl made from cholla wood and epoxy, with blue, green, yellow and red tints in the epoxy. The blue is darker than I intended, almost a black, but I think overall it works.
Sold as part of a fundraising auction to support MetaFilter.
#bowl #cholla #epoxy #woodworking #woodturning
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One afternoon we looked out the window to see a bunch of small birds feeding on the seeds of our Ravenna grass. This was the best photo of the bunch, I think.
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This little fellow believed he owned our hummingbird feeder much of our first summer in New Mexico. He would perch on the stalk of a yucca flower for hours, guarding the feeder which was about 20 feet from his throne.
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Another photo taken in our yard in New Mexico, this prickly pear had flowered, and one of the local rabbits had nibbled on a flower (we guess). I thought it looked pretty.
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I caught this hummingbird feeding at the butterfly bush in our front courtyard our first summer in New Mexico. We initially thought it was an Anna’s Hummingbird, so we named her (?) Annabelle.
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