Making wig stands for the cancer center can get pretty boring, pretty quick.  There’s not a whole lot of variation in the actual turning, so if you’re going to do anything other than “brown and round”, you have to have all that figured out before you start.  That takes imagination, and imagination is a fickle bitch!

After making the padded wig stand, I decided I wanted to do something that added some kind of color and fiber to the project.  My initial attempt was a thin, light pink ribbon, that I thought would be subtle.  As I started to add  the ribbon, though, I realized it was actually elastic and cause a whole host of problems.  It stretched when it wanted to, so the wrappings were very uneven.  It also didn’t like the spray on adhesive I was using to keep it in place, so every so often there’d be this gummy, booger like lump that would show up between the wrappings.  I tore it all off, sanded off the blue, and went back to Hobby Lobby to look for options.  I found pink para-cord that looked like it would be sturdy enough to work with and would hopefully complete the look I was going for.  It wasn’t until AFTER I had the project done that I realized the florescent pink color took all the “subtlety” out of the project.  If there’s a cancer patient out there who’s absolutely bonkers for the color pink, this one would be their first pick…

I was going through the stash of wood that I have, looking at what was roughed out and ready to turn, what was still waiting to be roughed, and how much checking the half logs had that were stacked in the garage.  At the bottom of the pile, I found a walnut bowl that I had started to rough turn, but found a flaw in the wood.  A tree branch had apparently started to grow, but must have been cut or broken off and the tree grew around it.  From the outside of the bowl, it looked like it would be barely noticeable.  From the inside, however, there was this half rotten spot that would need to be “fixed”.  Apparently, I had decided it wasn’t worth the effort and threw it in a box to dry.

Earlier me would have thrown it in the burn pile.  Lacking both imagination and skill, a flawed piece of wood would be a “give up and find something else to do” kind of moment.  Current me said, “there is no better wood to turn that a piece of walnut”, followed quickly by “I can fix this”.  There were two options.  I could mix up some kind of colored epoxy and turn the divot in the wood into a feature, or take a more traditional approach to fill the hole.  Since the spot wasn’t that big, adding one tiny blot of color didn’t seem to make much sense, so I opted for the traditional approach of mixing walnut dust with CA glue and sanding until the surface was smooth and the repair couldn’t be felt.  This is the result.

While I was looking for office supplies to use/abuse for the bowl for my secretary, I happened to see an end cap display for some holiday decorations.  There, just above the plastic cornucopia, was a bag of tightly crinkled paper in fall colors.  I stared at it for awhile, trying to figure out what the intended purpose was for a whole bag of wadded up, yet colorful, paper strips.  There has to be a market for this stuff, since someone obviously took the time to make a special “cut and crinkle machine” to mass produce it.  But, why?  Is there some kind of fall celebration, like a mid year Easter, that would require stuff like this to make filler for a basket?  Do pet hamsters get some kind of seasonal depression that can be cured by adding crinkled paper in festive fall colors to their bedding?  Maybe (since the default interior design move seems to be to stuff a hurricane glass with something made in holiday colors, then stuff a candle in the middle) this was made for a specific niche audience.

I just wondered what it would look like, soaked in resin.

The “look”, totally changes!  The bright, festive, holiday colors get dark and not so festive.  It doesn’t exactly look like it would fit in with a Martha Stewart inspired celebration around a perfectly carved turkey, candied yams, cranberry chutney, a complimentary wine, and happy conversation with extended family.  It looks more like a gloomy, somewhat depressed version of thanksgiving, where everyone’s eating canned turkey, boxed potatoes, stolen apples from the neighbor’s tree, a whole case is Falstaff, and trying hard no to slip up and mention what happened to Uncle Joe’s parole officer.

Maybe I’ll just put a candle inside of it and stuff it inside a hurricane glass…

After the last failure with using resin, I decided to go back to basics a bit and do something simpler.  Something that wouldn’t take as long, would be as complicated, and would help build experience mixing and pouring resin.  The result were these two small bowls.

My secretary has been dropping not-so-subtle hints for the last three years or so that I haven’t made her anything.  When I brought in the pencil holder, made of colored pencils, she really seemed to like it, so I figure I’d make something similar for her desk, but didn’t know what.  My first thought was to find some non-metal paperclips and make her a little bowl to hold paper clips.  What I found is that no one makes standard shaped paperclips out of anything BUT metal, so that idea was out.  I saw a bag of colored rubber bands and thought that might work.  What a mistake!  Remember the old commercials about the Gillette double edged razors?   The one with the graphic about how the first blade stretches the whisker out so the second one can cut it off, shorter?  Well rubber bands encased in resin act much the same way.  Or, they squish around the tool and don’t cut at all.  Most annoying, were the ones that only cut a little bit, and then flapped around slapping everything as the lathe was spinning.  The final product turned out ok, although I can’t say this is the best thing I’ve ever made.