When I was a kid, I was in the Boy Scouts. For a short period of time, one of the scout masters was a man named Mr. Zoerb. I can only remember going on one camp-out where he was there, but remember just how much he knew about nature, starting fires, sharpening knives, and weather. Weird what sticks with you and what gets left behind.
Years went by, and there he was again, my high school math teacher. Freshman year was algebra, which I thought was pretty stupid. It always seemed like abstract concepts that wouldn’t ever serve a purpose. I remember thinking “I hope someone finds X soon, because I’m getting damned tired trying to find it”. Looking back, I may have been a little off base on that whole line of thought, because I’ve actually had to “do math” and was surprised just how much I remembered. I had him again for Senior math, although for the life of me, I can’t remember anything about what was taught. Apparently all of that was just preparatory to (nearly) fail calculus in college.
Sophomore year was different. That year, Mr. Zoerb was my Geometry teacher, and I was still convinced there was absolutely no real-world application for any of the stuff we were learning. Would I ever need to figure out the radius of a cone? Nope! The opposite angle measurement of a parallelogram? Not a chance! Anything to do with a compass? Hell no! A compass was next in the conga line of obsolescence, right up front, sandwiched between the abacus and the slide rule. That being said, geography came easy to me and as useless as it was, I actually had fun trying to solve all the little puzzles that we were given. Much to my surprise, later in life as I was doing some home-owner type projects, being able to figure out angles for trim actually called all that knowledge out of the mental dustbins it had been relegated into.
Lately, turning wood has become the dominant focus of free time and I’m finding I like doing some kind of embellishment to turned items more than I like the actual turning itself. Much of my experimentation with different processes has played out on this blog, whenever the creativity muse stops by to visit. Some might remember the project where I burned the mandala-like patterns daughter #2 had put on a bowl. (Here’s the article, for anyone who’d like to see it.) Looking at that piece, I thought “I wonder how she comes up with those patterns”, and “I wonder how hard it would be to make it look less “freehand”?
Armed only with a pencil and a will to succeed, I sketched out a mandala that I thought could easily be burned over and tried my best to make it all symmetrical and even. It quickly became apparent that drawing mandalas freehand belongs on the list of artist-like stuff I suck at, alongside drawing stick-men, straight lines, and anything that’s supposed to resemble a known object. There would have to be a better way.
So I went to YouTube to see if I could find instructions to make the mandalas look more symmetrical and less like it was done by an epileptic toddler. There, I discovered a channel called Geometry Trip. This guy does absolutely amazing work, using just a compass and a straightedge, to make the most intricate designs I think I’ve ever seen. Everything he makes is based on the intersection of circles, connecting points between circles, and all that “stuff” Mr. Zoerb tried to teach unwilling student back in the late 70’s. Suddenly, the thought of playing around with a compass actually sounded fun!
Here are the first two projects that I’ve completed. The first one is a “simple” mandala, done (mostly) by following his tutorial. I know it was a “simple” mandala, because the video was titled “How to Draw a Mandala for Beginners | Step by Step” and he said in the video this one was easy. To him, I’m sure this was barely a warmup. To me, I quickly learned that “simple” is a relative term and that I needed a better compass. New compass in hand, this was the result:
The second piece is another project that started out mimicking the beginning of one of his videos, then things just kinda strayed off course. When it was done, I decided it needed color since the last one was left bare, but it took some time to think about how bright the colors should be. I finally settled on very sedate colors, since the base color of the wood was darker. I used the “acrylic wash” effect from my old wood carving days and this is the end result. Much better than the first attempt!
I hadn’t really thought much about Mr. Zoerb for at least 20 years, but heard a few years back he had passed away. As I was making these designs, though, a lot of old memories HHS memories came back. I figure if he’s able to see these from the other side, he’d most likely approve, or at least approve more than the construction packets that we had to fill out and turn in for a grade. Guess that’s what I tell myself anyway.
Way back when I’d only been seriously turning for a few years, I put some pieces in a gallery in Normal, just to see if anyone was interested in them. To my surprise, I actually sold pieces. The affirmation was better than the money. One of the pieces that sold, popped up on my Facebook wall a few days later. Turns out Jack, a guy I went to school with, and his wife bought it. Talk about small world!
Time went by, and around a year ago Jack sent me a note asking me if I wanted any elm wood to turn. He didn’t know if it’d be any good, because the tree had bumps all over it. He sent me the pictures below and my jaw hit the floor. This tree was absolutely covered in burls (or burrs, if you’re on the other side of the pond). If done right, this wood would make some of the prettiest pieces you can imagine. I made arrangements to be there when the tree guy was taking it down and carted away as much as I felt comfortable hauling in the suburban. When I got home, I sealed it to lessen the chances of it splitting and waited.
Since I haven’t worked that much with fresh burls, I didn’t know how long it would take for the wood to dry. The project I had in mind would have to be fully dried, or it would likely rip itself up shortly after being finished, so I just kept waiting.
Every time I’d pass the pile of wood, I’d check it out to see if any of it had split, and smile when I didn’t the any damage. One day, though, there was a piece on the top that seemed like it was ready. it was smaller than the rest and was a slightly different color, so I figured it was worth the risk. I put it on the lathe and turned the outside shape, taking care to see if the wood got wetter as the outside of the blank was shaped. Everything seemed to be pretty good, so I brought it inside and let it sit in silicone desiccant for a week or so to make sure it was dry. After a week of nervous waiting, I decided it was time to finish the piece.
First step was to fill all the spaces in the piece where the “good wood” and the burls had come apart as well as all the normal voids and bark inclusions that are present with any burl. iridescent copper seemed like a good choice of color and contrast, so off I went doing the epoxy work. I learned quickly that there must be more gaps inside the project than I thought, because the first pour of epoxy completely disappeared into the wood. I let it cure for a week or so, then did a second pour, thinking this would be it. No, this one also disappeared, which meant another week of waiting before the next pour. Eventually, I got it on the lathe, reshaped the outside and realized that there were still gaps in the blank where the resin hadn’t reached, yet, so it was back to the basement for more epoxy work. When I started on the inside, the same issues came up with unknown voids, so more epoxy work was needed and more time was spent waiting.
Eventually, the bowl was completed, but I needed a lid. Bob, my friend and mentor, gave me a piece of some kind of exotic wood that he’d had for many, many, years which just happened to be the right color and grain pattern so as not to fight with the chaos of the burl. I added a piece of maple, dyed black, for the finial, but on three coats of poly, and suddenly the piece was done.
I told Jack and his wife when I was there getting the wood that the first piece I made was theirs. That seems only fair and a small gesture for all the fun they had unknowingly provided. It’ll be hard to send this off, but hopefully they’ll enjoy this one and see that the tree did all the work making it spectacular to look at, I was just there for the ride!
Thank you, Jack, I can’t wait to see what else is hiding in the burl pile.
Here is the finished project. All three parts came together very, very, well!Looking at the inside of the bowl, the burl really shows through.
Sometimes, I just get in a mood that I can’t really define. It could be boredom, might be anxiety, could be depression, or maybe it’s just a combination of all of those. Who knows? Such was the case a week or so ago. Not sad, not angry, not lonely, not happy, just stuck in idle.
I went out to the shop, intending to make something, but instead got caught up doing a little cleaning and putting stuff back where it belonged. As I was shuffling the clutter, I picked up a little soft maple bowl I had turned green and set aside to dry. It felt pretty dry to me, so I decided to put it on the lathe and see what happened. What happened was I produced a bowl that seemed to match the drab mood I was in: Very basic shape, no spectacular grain, just ho-hum all the way around.
I sat it up on a table next to the door and started sweeping up the mess I’d made. Every once in awhile I’d look over at it, hoping some form of inspiration would hit me, but it just sat there in apparent defiance. After the sweeping was done, I picked it up, but sat it back down with no change whatsoever. After resharpening the tools I’d used, I looked at it again and started going through the usual list of things I could do. Add epoxy? No, there was no place for it to go, since I hadn’t designed that in to the overall shape. Add some carving? No, it’s way too thin for any kind of carving and way too thick for any kind of piercing. Add color? No, there’s basically no wood grain for the color to enhance, so it would just be the same lackluster bowl with a heavy coat of paint on it. As I brought it into the house, I decided it was going to be designer firewood. I’d play around with one of the new woodburning tips I’d gotten, play around with the new India ink pens, and just use this piece to practice on, catch up on a podcast I’ve been listening to, and kill some time.
That’s when something happened.
I made a circle and decided to practice making flowers. This time, though, I decided not to make round petals, but pointy petals kinda like a poinsettia. When the flower was done, it looked like a flower, so I decided to add some leaves using a technique I’d seen on a video of some woman doing henna painting. That looked pretty good, too. Then, I decided to make some “thingies” that trailed down, like seed pods or a place for bees to land. When the whole flower was burned in, I couldn’t decide what I’d made. It wasn’t a poinsettia, wasn’t any flower I could remember seeing, and it looked vaguely alien. I decided to make another one, only this time I’d practice making a “stacked” effect by having the flowers touch. That looked pretty good too, so I just kept going. In all honesty, I just kinda zoned out at that point, concentrating instead on the podcast that was playing. For the next two episodes, about two hours in total, I just kept making these alien poinsettia-like things.
When the burning was done, I started playing with the purple and green ink markers. The brightness of the greens, next to the darker purple (with the very subtle shading created by also blending in a maroon ink marker) really stood out against the bland background of the maple. I liked it!
Once the whole thing was finished, I realized that I hadn’t made firewood after all, this one actually looks pretty good! I also realized that my mood was considerably better. I’m starting to think that the way my brain has been wired (or re-wired) almost requires some kind of creative outlet to keep going. Without it, things just kind of wind down to a slug’s pace.
I seem to have been doing a lot of projects lately that involve significant amounts of time spent texturing wood with a wood burner. It can quickly become tedious, but the impact really is nice, especially when you pick the piece up and can feel the roughness. I turned a piece of cherry that really was bland. No strong grain pattern, no deep color, absolutely nothing to make the bowl appealing. I decided to burn a few flowers on it, then color in the petals with india ink to make them stand out.
As I started looking at the wood burning tips I had, I wondered if there was a way to leverage the fixed size of the tips to make the burning process simpler. My thought was rather than doing all the designs freehand, if I could “stamp” pieces of the design, it would be both faster and more consistent. On my second try, I hit the perfect combination of tips, resulting in flowers with eight petals that were VERY consistent in size and shape. My initial thought was to leave the bowl natural and only texture the very center of the flowers. That all changed when a new episode of a podcast I subscribe to started a new episode. The result was another bowl with an excessive amount of “fiddly work” completed to texture the whole thing.
I figured I’d start working on something else and went upstairs to get something to drink while I considered what might be fun. As I was looking through a cabinet for the missing lid on my glass, I found a tall, cylindrical, glass, vase. It could have come from IKEA, but most likely it was left over from an old anniversary rose my former company used to give to their employees. Either way, I started thinking and the next project was chosen.
I went out to the shop and found a piece of maple I had roughed out a long time ago, intending to make a vase. It was dry, had warped a little, but was perfect for the next project. Using a forstner bit, I drilled a hole that was slightly bigger than the glass vase, completed smoothing out the outside shape to remove the warping, and headed back downstairs. Rather than do the exact same design as what was on the bowl, I decided to see if the same process could be used to make consistent 5 petaled flowers. Turns out, with a larger fishtail bit, the process works pretty good!
A couple of days later, I was finished with a companion piece to the bowl. In all honesty, I also have no sense of feeling on the side of one finger from all the heat coming off the wood burner. Oh well, it was worth it.
Not sure where I’ll take this, or if I’ll do more of this, but for now, I love these two!
A very nice woman named Mona reached out to the turning club I’m in to see if anyone could help. She came into possession of three “tree cookies” that held sentimental value for a friend of hers and asked if there was anyone in the club who could help turn them into something more. I had to look it up, but a “tree cookie” is basically a round slab of wood taken off the end of a log, with the bark still all around the edge. There were some issues with the cookies, but I guess I’m a sucker for projects that have a sentimental attachment to them, so I said I’d see what I could do with them.
When I met with Mona and she showed me the slabs. All three of them were about 14″ across, were anywhere from 1″- 3″ thick, had cracked fairly severely during the drying process and the wood had warped as well. My first thought was “WOW, there’s nothing here to work with!”. One cookie was absolutely unusable, since it was cracked, twisted from warping, too thin, and had a large rotten/punky section that covered at least a third of the wood. It is now firewood. The second was also cracked and twisted, but had the extra issue of being thin on one side and thick on the other. I decided it might be possible to salvage something, but it would most likely be a much smaller project using only a portion of the cookie. The last blank was the most promising of the three. Yeah, it had a large crack from the pith to the edge, yes, it had at least 50 other cracks of various depths and lengths throughout the wood, yes it had twisted when it warped, BUT… It was a LOT thicker than the others, so I had hopes a more usable blank could be created. I took the two cookies, committed to doing something with the best one and said I’d do what I could – if I could – to the one that was a little iffy.
he first step was to make sure the cookies were completely dry, since no matter what I ended up doing, there would be epoxy involved in the process. If the wood is too wet when the epoxy is used, two potential problems are introduced. First, it could mess up the way the epoxy cures, potentially causing it to be cloudy, brittle or not fully cure. Second, once the epoxy cures, it’s absolutely solid and does not move, but the wood will always move. The more moisture in the wood, the more it will move, so if the wood was too wet it could literally rip the completed project apart as the wood moves as the moisture leaves, but the epoxy doesn’t. To pull the moisture out of the wood, I buried the cookies into a tub of silica desiccant. (Silica desiccant gel are what’s in those little packages you find in the bottom of new shoe boxes with the big “DO NOT EAT” warning printed on the side.) Not only does this draw the moisture out much faster than waiting for the moisture to evaporate naturally, it pulls the moisture very evenly, which reduces the chances of the drying process causing more cracks. Once the two cookies were dried, the condition of the cracks were assessed, and I had a little more time to think about what I felt I could do, the initial request split into 4 sererate projects. The second cookie would be split into three small blanks, then turned into three bowls. The “best” cookie would be kept as a single blank and turned into a large plate or shallow bowl.
Once the eventual placement of the blanks was decided, the epoxy work was started to fill in all the cracks. For this, I used an iridescent cranberry colored mica powder with the epoxy to provide a contrasting color.
I started working on the biggest crack first. It ended up taking multiple pours to get the crack to fill, mainly since so much epoxy leaked out during the curing process.
The next step was to lay out where the individual blanks would be cut from the cookie.
Once the main crack was filled, the three blanks were cut out where the circles were placed. Each of them needed additional epoxy work, so cardboard was affixed to the sides and bottom to prevent epoxy from leaking out, then they were flooded with epoxy.
These two blanks are the ones that do NOT have the big crack included in them. The blank sitting on edge is the blank with the large crack. It only needed a little more epoxy added, so a cardboard was glued to the top and bottom, allowing a grove to form on the edge that would hold the resin.
Project 1: The small epoxy bowl
The first blank that I turned was the one who’s main feature was going to be the large crack that had been filled. After turning the outside of the bowl, it was pretty clear that the epoxy would be a prominent part of the overall look of the bowl. When the inside of the bowl was removed, it allowed light to come through, which looked pretty cool.
Project #2: The lidded bowl with a tall finial.
The thought behind this bowl, was to hollow out the middle of the blank to make a bowl that had a lid that fit on top. To get the wood to make the lid, I had to use something other than the cookie, since there wasn’t much of it left. I found a piece of oak flooring in that shop that was big enough to make the lid out of and after turning it, the flooring actually came out with a very similar color to match the wood in the cookie. For the finial, I wanted to use a different color of wood, something darker, just to provide more contrast. I ended up using a pen blank that was darker and had a reddish hue to is. It might be sepele or mahogany.
Project #3: The lidded bowl with walnut lid
For the third bowl, there was very little epoxy visible on the final turning. The cracks that were filled with the cranberry epoxy were deep, but they were very thin, so the lines left in the wood blended in easily with the grain. After shaping the outside of the blank, it became clear that the bowl would look very plain. To add some interest, I decided to turn this blank into another lidded bowl, except this lid would be much more of a deliberate contrast to the oak. After finishing the bowl, I found a piece of walnut that was very damaged, full of cracks and voids, which I filled with a blue iridescent epoxy. The blue really stands out against the dark walnut wood, and the dark walnut wood really stands out against the oak.
Project #4: The big bowl
The main reason I agreed to do any of this work was to do something with this big, thick, blank. The plan was to fill the crack with clear resin, but add something to be suspended in the resin that would provide interest. Mona sent me a small box containing the items she’d like to have included. The seeds and seed pods wouldn’t be hard to include, but I wasn’t sure how to include the large acorn husk, the seashell, and the rock that was also in the box.
The first issue that had to be worked out was how to keep the piece from exploding while on the lathe. There were so many cracks in the bowl, one wrong move and the whole thing could easily explode. I knew they would need filled with epoxy, but I didn’t want to fill the main split until I was sure what the final shape and thickness would be or I’d run the risk of turning away the items that were encased in the resin. An iterative approach was needed. I put a line of hot glue on the underside of the blank along every single crack I could see to “plug up” the crack and prevent resin leakage. Then, I carefully added tiny amounts of resin into the tops of the cracks, letting it flow down into the cracks to seal them. This was a slow and tedious process. For the big crack, I put a thin (1/8″) layer of resin in the bottom that would eventually be turned away, and epoxy’d a scrap piece of wood across the crack so it wouldn’t move.
I had hopes of being able to turn the underside of the bowl once, then never return, but that’s just not the way this project went. Some of the cracks were so small that the resin couldn’t fully fill the holes as air got trapped inside the blank. Once I thought I was done, there was another round of sealing the cracks with hot blue (this time on the top of the blank) and adding tiny amount of resin into the cracks on the bottom to fully fill the cracks. Since the surface was now sloped, I had to build little dams around each of the cracks with hot glue to stop the resin from running down out of the cracks and down the slope of the bowl. There were multiple iterations of this process until the bottom of the bowl was in a final, finished form. Then attention turned to the top of the bowl.
To see what I was working with on the top of the bowl, I sealed any small cracks that were present with resin, then put the blank on the lathe and turned the top of the blank to nearly final thickness. About midway through the process, I realized the same issues that were present when turning the bottom were also present on the top, so I was back to the iterations of mini epoxy ours. Note how cracks had started to appear where the bark attached to the wood. jThose weren’t visible from the underside. As I was repairing that crack, I also brushed multiple coats of epoxy on to the top and bottom of ALL of the bark. My how was the resin would help stabilize any movement within the bark and that some of the resin would soak into the bark well enough that it would also adhere to the wood.
Finally, the top shape was complete, all the small cracks were filled, and I was ready to start adding epoxy and items into the larger crack. When looking at the items and the overall thickness of the platter, it was clear the rock would not be possible. It was bigger than the crack, and I really didn’t want to try to turn stone encased in resin, for fear of what it might do to my tools and that it would cause the epoxy to crack if the forces on the lathe proved to be too powerful. The shell, if it was going to be included, would have to be nearly exactly in the middle of the resin, since I thought it would explode as soon as the tool touched it. The trickiest part was to figure out how to suspend all of the items so they were evenly distributed throughout the crack. This required multiple, small, resin pours, essentially gluing something in place, adding a little opoxy, gluing something else in place, adding a little epoxy… I was back to the iterative process. The acorn husk wanted to float, as did the acorn, so I had to tape them down while the epoxy cured.
Little by little, layer by layer, the items were added.
Then it was time for the final turning. To me, this is always the most anxious part, since one mistake could have easily ruined all this work. Luckily, everything worked out as expected.
The end result turned out very, VERY good! Even though this was a commissioned piece, it was still hard to see it go.
I found a piece of maple that I’d forgotten I’d roughed out. Somehow, instead of being piled alongside of all the others, it was sitting underneath the tool chest. Not sure how it got there, but perhaps I pushed it with the broom as I was cleaning up and just forgot to go back and retrieve it. Since it was dry, I figured that was a sign I was supposed to start working on it.
Looking at the shape I’d left when I roughed it, it was clear this was meant to be a shallow bowl. It only took about 45 minutes to get the turning done, even though it is about 1/8″ thick on the side walls. Surprisingly enough, the end grain wasn’t too chewed up, so the sanding went pretty quick, too! I was just about to take it off the lathe to remove the tenon, when I realized the reason it had been so easy to turn and sand is the grain was about as straight as could be. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but to me, it just looked blah. Like vanilla ice cream kind of blah.
I took out the blowtorch and tried to burn the wood to bring out the grain pattern more. While that works really good on pine, on soft maple, it wasn’t nearly as striking. I sanded it back and realized that very little had changed about the piece. All I had done was darken the entire piece, and not in a good way!
Thinking the blowtorch was a bust, I decided this would most likely end up as a throw away piece, so it would be the perfect project to play around a bit. Since I hadn’t done anything with dyes in awhile, I figured this was as good a time as any other to play with them. At that point, I realized that I’d moved all the dyes from the garage shop into the basement AND that I was too lazy to traipse all the way through the house for a project I figured would be burnt within a week. Then, I remembered I still had a box of RIT fabric dye, in a multitude of colors that I had left in the garage. I found the bottle of black and went back to the lathe.
After coating the whole bowl, I let it dry while I mowed the yard. When I came back, the blank was a dry as it could be, so I was able t proceed. I sanded the bowl back using 240 grit paper, intending to leave just a little black remaining on the wood grain. Nice thought, but what I actually got was the entire bowl looking very dark. In all honesty, it looked surprisingly like walnut! . Next, I put on some red and liked the way it changed to color, without making it look too obvious. There’s still enough of color from both the burning and the black dye, that it didn’t come out a cartoon color. I decided it was as good as it was going to be, called it a day, and added three coats of lacquer.
I saw a new word today: Impermanence. The dictionary says it’s the lack of permanence, something transient, temporary. Most likely, I already knew the word, but seeing it in print hit me harder than it should have.
My oldest grand-daughter just turned 5 a week or so ago. As I watched her pregnant mother, my second daughter, fussing with all the details at the birthday party, it reminded me that it wasn’t so long ago I was celebrating HER 5th birthday. Another daughter brought her two over to my house a few days later and as I helped my grandson trying desperately to load a nerf gun and “loaned” a few coins to the my granddaughter so she could play with a toy vending machine, it struck me that a year ago neither would have been interested in either task. Something was different now.
Today, as I was picking my son up from work, I watched him come out of the building. He was laughing and talking with a co-worker. They stopped and although I couldn’t hear the conversation, I saw a level of maturity in my son’s mannerisms as the conversation played out that took me by surprise. With it came the sudden realization this was not the boy I thought I’d dropped off.
Just for giggles, I googled the house I grew up in and looked at the satellite image. The picnic shelter my father and brothers had built had been torn down as well as the barn I used to escape into when I wanted to be alone. Now, there’s a fenced back yard, trees missing, and a second driveway to a huge garage and a pool sitting where my mom always planted a garden that was much bigger than was ever necessary. Funny, I guess I had always figured those things would still be there, no matter who owned the property, but the landscape was different. Altered. “Improved”.
Everything changes. It’s an eventual progression, an erosion of what doesn’t belong anymore, or a subtle shift toward whatever comes next. There’s no stopping it, no controlling it, and no real way to even measure it in the moment. It can only be measured with hindsight, where memories mark the changes like old video tapes being rewound so all the little differences can be seen in their glaring reality. Initials carved in trees are cut up with the firewood, graffiti is painted over, records are broken, gravestones fall and get reclaimed by the soil, old songs stop being sung, and the list just keeps going.
Impermanence. Not something that’s occupied a lot of my mind up to now, but I suspect it will become much more of a focus in the future.
My turning club has been invited to do another demonstration, which will be held next month. I’ve learned that when we go to these kinds of things, the people who visit us want to see two things. First, they want to see chips flying! I’ve been turning long enough that the sight of wood being removed has long any kind of magic, but for those who haven’t been around turning much, they seem to get a real kick out of seeing the shape slowly take shape and marvel at just what a mess the whole process makes. Second, they want to see completed projects. It doesn’t seem to matter what the project is, just as long as there is a variety of things to see.
That second requirement got me thinking. There are many in the club who seem to make a lot of “brown and round”. Technically, many of these pieces are exceptionally well done! All the boxes are checked: very consistent wall thickness, sanded to the nth degree, and an impeccable finish applied. With an interesting piece of wood, these pieces can be very appealing. I tend to shy away from bringing these projects when taking pieces to a demo. To me, there’s a benefit to bringing items that have more embellishments, different shapes, and different materials, thinking the wider the variety, the more appealing the demo will be.
Since we’ll be in the middle of a maple forest in the middle of September, I thought I’d do something autumn themed. I found two bowls that I had turned, but hadn’t put any finish on them, thinking they were too plain and “would need something added at some point down the road”. Well, it looks like we’re down the road.
The first one was supposed to be a practice piece, since this was the first time I’d attempted blending india inks, but it worked MUCH better than I’d expected. The burning on this one took about 10 hours, most of which was spent putting in all the background texture.
When I got done with the first one, I have to admit that my fingers were pretty sore from the heat coming off the wood burner, so I decided NOT to do the extensive texturing on the second one. Instead, I thought I’d try to make it look like the leaves were overlapping each other. I also threw away the template I had used on the first one and just did all the burning free-hand. This one turned out MUCH better than the first one.
When you put the two of them side by side, I think I’ve done a fairly good job with the colors, but to be honest, the second one is much better than the first. Guess that’s to be expected. I’ve already got the next one in my head, but for that one there needs to be texture carved into the leaves before the burning and the coloring.
The fall demo has “suggested” that we offer pieces for sale and I was thinking of putting a price on these. When I asked a daughter what price she would suggest, there was an icy state and the answer of “dibs”. Not sure that was the answer I was hoping for…
I’m sure I’ve talked about this before, but my second daughter just loves to doodle. When she was in high school, she’d take a pen or marker and just start making these intricate designs that remind me on henna painting on whatever was available. Paper, her arm, her jeans, other people’s arms, books… It seems just about anything that would stay stationary long enough to be doodled on was fair game. At the time, we didn’t see it as a good thing, but now, I have to admit I’m pretty impressed that she can just make these kinds of designs, seemingly without effort.
As I was looking back at some old photos on my turning club’s website, I came across the wig stand that she did to support the club and donate to the Susan G. Komen foundation. Here’s a picture of what I’m talking about:
When that was made, I’d always wondered if a design like that would transfer to a bowl, but then life got in the way and that fleeting thought disappeared.
During the pandemic lockdowns, I had spent some time turning up wood that had been sitting around for awhile. One piece was from this really, really nasty ash tree. It had been killed by the ash beetles, left standing for (apparently) years, had prior damage done to the trunk before dying, and was all around unusable. I took my best guess at where the bad spots would be and started cutting blanks. Sometimes, all I got for my efforts was more firewood for the hot dog roasts, but there were a few blanks that slipped through. I turned one of them, but was immediately struck by just how plain the grain was. All that work, and nothing of any interest to show for it.
Then that old thought leapt out of the depths and I thought “I’ll get my daughter to doodle it up!” Since she was an “essential worker”, she didn’t have nearly as much down time as I had, so the project sat for awhile. The she finished, but I forgot again to pick it up and it sat for even more time. This month, nearly a year later, I got the bowl back and decided to wood burn her design into the bowl and see how it looked. MUCH better than when I took it off the lathe!
Burning in her design wasn’t that hard, but when I was done, it needed more. I decided to do a heavy texture over all the background, which improved the look dramatically! The more I looked at it, though, the more I realized that when burning the texture in, there was still speckles of the lighter, whiter, wood that showed through. To get rid of the splotchiness, I painted all of the texture with black india ink, which solved the problem. Looking at the design more, there were areas of blank space that didn’t stand out, until it was put on a black background. With my daughter’s permission, I added some designs to fill in the open spaces, and this became the final project. Matte finish was added to protect the wood without making it shiney, which actually makes the black blacker somehow.
Pretty proud of this collaboration! I love having creative children!
Here are some pics of the progress, along with some shots of the final result:
This clip was taken after all the burning of the design was done. Some of the pencil marks were mine and some were my daughter’s.
This is the start of the texturing process. Each one of those black dents was done with a wood burner, one touch after another, after another, after another…
This was taken after the initial texturing was done. The “blank spots” in the doodles can really be seen here.Here it is after there was something put in those blank spaces. The patchiness of the woodburning can be seen here, which is why black dye was added to the final project.
I’ve been working through a very large stash of maple bowl blanks and after awhile, maple gets to be pretty boring to work with, especially if it’s straight grained wood with no spalting. It’s easy to turn, but it’s about as generic as you can get. Think of it like eating ice cream any time you want, but it’s only vanilla with no sprinkles. That’s not a bad thing (some people may think that’s great), but for me, it doesn’t take long before I’m dreaming of being spoon deep in a half gallon of Moose Tracks.
So what do I do when things stat to get boring? Go find some sprinkles!
I was working on the smaller bowl later in the evening, when some real asshat neighbors started lighting off fireworks. Since I’ve lived here, it’s been pretty much a repeating indication of the season. Starting about the second week of June until some time about the middle of July, fireworks will be lit off just about every night. It’s usually only about 20 minutes or so between the first explosion and the last, but as the 4th approaches, it become longer with the time between explosions getting shorter. If the neighborhood is lucky, the “show” will be over by 10:00, but every once in awhile it’ll be more like midnight to 2:00. It makes me wonder just how much money they spend each year on something that’s illegal in this state and why the local police haven’t been able to figure out who is begging for a ticket. Sometimes it’s just bottle rockets or Roman candles, but there’s usually at least one, big, colorful, explosion that will light up the sky, shake the windows, and make every dog in the neighborhood bark, pee, or hide under a bed.
When I heard the window rattler go off, I started thinking about some creative way to add fireworks to a project, like some carving filled with glow in the dark powder in resin. Then, as my mine is prone to do, I started to drift. Maybe instead of fireworks ON the project, I could put fireworks IN the project. If I could find the horrible neighbors and pick up all the pink and red sticks from the arsenal of bottle rockets they’ve shelled the neighborhood with, I could cast them in resin somehow. As a bonus window rattler set the next door neighbor’s dogs howling, I thought to myself “what kind of person is that patriotic? It’s not like Captain America lives here”. That was the thought that stuck: Captain America.
The first bowl was really just a proof of concept piece to plan out the steps. Turning the bowl was easy, then came adding the stars. I printed a pattern, then used the indexing function of my lathe to make sure they were aligned evenly, traced them on the bowl and used a wood burner to etch them into the side of the bowl. Blue spray paint was next, which covered the burnt part, but left an indented line where the starts needed to go. So far, so good! When the paint was dry, I went back to the woodburner to re-establish the hard line that would outline the while start. That’s where things started to go wrong. It turns out, if you burn through enamel spray paint, it melts, leaving a scorch mark in the wood flanked by two little mini-dams of paint. At first, I tried to paint the stars using acrylic paint, keeping the pain inside the burned part and thought the little mini-dams would help. They didn’t, the white paint went through the dams in some places, and into the burned part in others. It look really, really, bad. When the acrylic paint dried, I took the wood burner back down the now familiar path around the stars and discovered another issue. When the heat hit the wood, it melted the spray paint again and caused it to leach out into and under the white paint. Damn! I tried it again, only this time I switched to enamel paint. HIt it with the wood burner to clean up the lines and it was worse than the acrylic paint. I ended up going back to the acrylic paint, tried multiple coats and used a small dental pick to clean up as much of the “oops” places as I could. I decided to call this one done and move on to a second try.
On the second bowl, I started with a wider, shorter bowl and replicated the same basic process. When the blue paint was drying, I looked at it and thought “that’s way too much blue, it needs something to break up the blueness”. I landed on red spray paint and tried to control the spray so that there was some kind of fading from blue to red. Then, it was on to the same exact battle I had had before on the first bowl. This time, I went straight to the acrylic paint and dental tools. It still looks a little sloppy to me, but from across the room it gets the aesthetic I was going for.
I’m already thinking about the next one and how I can get the blue confined to the band with the stars, then red and white stripes on the rest of the bowl. I think I’ve got the spacing figured out, but I don’t even start it until I can find a better solution for the sloppy stars.
