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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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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This is a flask I made that holds about a pint. It’s white oak, with cherry inserts on the faces. One of the cherry inserts has olive, oak and ash inserts, the other is turned. The stopper is ash.
It was made for a swap on Lumberjocks.
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This is a bowl I made from cholla and red-tinted epoxy. It’s about 8 inches in diameter and about 5 inches high. The cholla was collected in our yard near Eldorado at Santa Fe, New Mexico.
#woodworking #bowl #cholla #epoxy
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