The woodturning club I’m in is still making wig stands for cancer patients, distributing them through the Susan G. Komen breast cancer centers. (Really sad that as many as we donate, they’re gone to new patients immediately.) They don’t take very long to make and I’m pretty sure those with cancer appreciate them, so at the last meeting, I picked up 4 kits. One is walnut, which I haven’t decided what I want to make out of it. I’m pretty sure there are specific laws against painting walnut, or at least there should be. The other three were maple and birch. Pretty boring wood, that would end up looking brown and round. I decided to dip them, just to add some color and some texture. If anyone’s done the hydro-dipping with spray paint, I will warn you again it is s sloppy, gloppy mess! I like the results, but wear gloves, do it somewhere that a splatter zone won’t cause problems, take care the over-spray doesn’t paint things you don’t want painted, and be careful not to breathe in the paint as it hits the water and bounces off. Huffing paint is still illegal and unhealthy.
Here are the finished products.
Finally figured out how to mix the paint without it becoming so clumpy when the wood is dipped. REALLY makes a difference!
Hopefully, whoever gets them will appreciate the work. More so, that they get through the treatments and live a long and fulfilled life.
I’ve been playing around with color a little bit. I’m not good at it (yet) but it’s giving me the opportunity to do something other than “brown and round”. One technique I’ve been playing with is dipping work in spray paint. This process has been called many things (hydro-dipping, water marbling, and ebru, if you’re in Turkey) and used on paper, nails, wood, guitars, skulls, and just about anything else. The process is basically the same. fill a tub full of water, spray different colors of spray-paint on the surface of the water, swirl it around, then dunk something in it. The paint will float on top of the water and transfer onto what ever is dipped. Sounds simple, right?
Not so fast!
The type of paint you spray makes a difference. I added some metallic silver paint and it doesn’t behave like regular spray paint and absolutely refuses to mix with it’s cousin. Instead, it kinda clumps up in little floating globs that stick to whatever you dip like a big shiny booger. Even two different colors of paint from the same manufacturer won’t always react like you’re expect. Some of it will stick to whatever you use to stir the paint before dipping, making another globby mess. It should also be noted that spray paint will completely ruin whatever you’re using to hold the water by leaving a Technicolor bath tub ring from hell. It will also stick to your hands so completely that mineral spirits are required to get rid of it. And don’t spill any on your driveway or it will look like someone murdered an artist’s palette in front of your house.
This project was nothing but luck, both good and bad. I started with a crappy piece of pine that should have been firewood because if had a huge knot right in the middle of it. Bad luck. When I turned the basic shape and took out the middle, somehow the knot was completely turned away. Good luck. When I started to do the painting, I put a flat coat of black spray paint on the whole thing, then dipped it in two different shades of blue, some red, and a little bit of the metallic. (One of my daughters saw it drying and said, “That looks like Spiderman”. As soon as she said it, I realized how right she was, hence the name.) Being pine and being dipped in water, as the bowl dried, it started to crack and the grain suddenly became very uneven. Bad luck. It also had the globs on the side from where the metallic paint failed to mix with the regular spray paint. More bad luck. I figured the only thing I could do was put it back on the lathe, turn off all the paint, get it back into round, then try the whole dipping thing again. About 30 seconds into sanding the paint off, I stopped the lathe because there was a weird color starting to come out. The grain that had raised by the water had been sanded bare, but the other parts of the bowl still had the dipped color. The effect of this happy accident was a really cool variation in the colors! Very good luck! All that was left was to finish the bottom of the bowl, which should have take about 5 minutes. 4:59 seconds into the process, the bowl came loose from the lathe and started banging around at a very high rate of speed. I was left with a smudge in the paint on one side and a series of holes near the base on the other side that looks like a rabid woodpecker went on a rampage. Bad luck…
Here’s the finished project. It looks really good from a distance, so I’ll keep it, but if another turner looked at it, the critiques would NOT be kind. With all that I learned with this project, the next one will be much, much better!
One side of the bowl. Here, you can see the after effects of the gloppy glops that stuck on the side of the bowl, near the bottom.Another side, this one with more of the blue and red remaining that my daughter said made it look like Spiderman.
Our town has a yearly “fine arts festival”, where they shut down three or four streets in the heart of town, invite a hundred or so artists in a wide variety of mediums to set up booths, then sit back and wait for thousands and thousands of people to herd through the narrow streets. Apparently, enough people buy things from the booths and the local businesses get enough business from the hoard of people passing by, that this thing is likely to continue. Each time I’ve gone, I ask myself why I subject myself to the experience. I’ve never liked big crowds, especially when the crowd is made up of people who are trying to one-up their co-meandering partner with their advanced knowledge of art theory, art history, the use of negative space, and the essentials of “form”. It’s always in mid July, so it is certain to be very hot, very humid, and very sweaty. I see the old folks lumbering behind their walkers and make a mental not to brush up on my CPR skills. Small babies cooking in their strollers makes my heart skip a beat and I have to stifle the urge to confront the parents. There is one booth that sells pointy, stained glass creations, meticulously hung from clear fishing line about five feet off the ground, appropriately called “eye catchers”. I saw a kid, about 6 years old, pick up a huge ceramic bowl that had a $450 price tag on it and cringed as his parents continued to ignore what he was doing. It’s only a matter of time until something really bad happens…
On the way home, I realized that like many, many other weekend crafters and would be artists who go to this thing, the reason I went was to see if there was any ideas I could “incorporate” and to look for “inspiration”. That’s a kind way of saying “anyone else’s creativity that I can steal”. This year I found a ceramics shop that was selling these little houses, kinda shaped like mushrooms, that actually looked cute when they were arranged together like a miniature village. I listened to the ceramicist/artist explain that each 3″ tall house took hours of painstaking skill, painting, and molding to create, obviously trying to justify the $35/each price tag that went with each one. Free enterprise is a wonderful thing, but the smell of BS was suddenly wafting through the crowd and I felt the urge to keep moving. When I got home, I took some scrap wood and turned out these little copies. It took longer to dye the wood and burn in the doors and windows than it did to do the actual turning, which I suspect is pretty consistent to the time and effort spent by the ceramicist on the originals.
Here is the first batch. I have a shelf that these will likely go on or maybe my desk at work, along with the others that I intend to make. After looking at these all together, it seems pretty clear that using wood without a lot of knots is a must! I’ve also come to realize the village they live in could use a good contractor. Seems like some pretty shoddy building methods and a total failure on the part of the building inspector…
First batch of little houses.Close up #1close up #2
After making the last two things from plywood, I still had plywood left over, so I figured I’d make something that was a combination of the last two projects. From the first effort, I took a bowl shape, but decided to make is more shallow and smaller. From the second effort, I took the (dangerous) cutting of the plywood to make the vertical stripes. Put those two together and this is the final product. About 13″ across, 4 inches tall, finished with two coats of Danish Oil to make the color a warm, soft, brown and two coats of Wipe on Poly for a little protection.
I figured I was done playing around with plywood, but as I was cleaning up the garage this weekend, I found some 1/8″ plywood over in a corner. Hum… If I wanted 90 segments, that would be a two degree bevel…
Cutting that many thin strips of plywood with a slight bevel on each edge to make the circle is not for the faint of heart!
About halfway through working on the basket bowl, I started thinking about “what if”… One of the ideas, was to make a bowl where the plywood was all vertical. I thought if I did it right, I could make something that looked like the inside of a grass hut. Kind of a Gilligan’s Island looking thing. Once I got the first experimental plywood blank glued up, I switched gears to making this one. To start, I thought I’d use thinner plywood to keep the size from creeping up as the pieces were assembled. This one is made from 1/4″ plywood.
Not to get in the weeds, but to make a circle, each piece of wood has to be cut to a very specific angle, so when they’re reassembled, they form a circle. The formula is pretty easy to understand. 360 divided by the number of segments divided by 2. If you want to make a 10 segment ring, it would be 360/10/2 or 18, so each piece of wood would be cut at 18 degree angles. For this project, I figured I’d need at least 30 segments to make a ring big enough, since each vertical piece was only going to be 1/4 inch at their widest point. So do the math and that comes down to a 6 degree angle. I looked at the 1/4″ wide plywood, looked at the table saw, and suddenly realized this was going to be the most dangerous thing I’ve attempted. The danger comes in when you try to take a piece of wood only a quarter of an inch think through a table saw, with the blade set at 6 degrees. Not a lot of room between the table saw fence and the blade. To make it at least a little better, I cut the angles at 12 degrees, which for this project, wouldn’t be noticeable. Still only 1/4” “safety” between the fence and the blade.
Took me a bit to get up the nerve, but I was finally able to make strips of plywood, with the appropriate angle, that I could cut into pieces. Initially, I was thinking it would make a bowl, but the 1/4″ only came out with a circle about 4-5 inches across. Not really big enough for a useful bowl. Add in a couple simple circles of plywood, and the blank became perfect for a small box. If I do another one of these, I think I’ll use the 3/4″ plywood, then glue the strips together before making the beveled cut. This will give me an inch and a half thick piece of wood to run through the table saw and mean I won’t need as many piece to make the circle. Maybe that won’t give me the heebie jeebies as bad.
Here’s the final product, with two coats of walnut oil, followed by two coats of wipe on poly.
I went out to YouTube and fell into the rabbit hole, where one video leads to another and another and another until two hours have passed and you’re so far away from what you were initially looking at that all you can do is shut down the computer and look around to make sure no one noticed. At some point, I stumbled across a series of videos where people were making bowls out of plywood. I had never really thought of plywood as being a viable turning material, let alone pretty, but I have to admit that some of the creations actually looked kinda cool.
The next day, I went to Mendard’s and picked up a 3/4″ piece of birch plywood and decided I should try to make something. What started out as a simple, stacked, segmented bowl, quickly started going off the rails. First, I messed up the measurements (again) and ended up making the pieces for a bowl that was so big, it would barely fit on my little lathe. Since I figured I’d have to use a friend’s lathe to safely turn the thing anyway, I decided to change the simple, stacked design into a wide, shallow, platter with a little bit of a basket weave look. When I messed up the measurements on the second ring, I realized that a shallow platter was out and I was going to have to end up making a HUGE bowl. After several days of cutting, sanding, gluing, and clamping, I finally had a bowl blank that was ready to turn.
If you’ve ever cut plywood with a saw, then you’re familiar with just how much sawdust is generated by a single cut. Now imagine doing that same cut with the wood spinning at several hundred RPM. It’s messy. Very, very, messy! Once done, however the final shape looked pretty good – EXCEPT – for all the damned holes! At some point, the people who make plywood decided they could save a extra penny by using really crappy waste wood for the inner layers of the plywood and if there were gaps, they could save two pennies. Normally, no one would ever know, but when the plywood is turned, all of those little gaps end up being holes in the side of the bowl. It took about an hour to fill all the holes with sawdust and CA glue, then about three hours of hand sanding to smooth over all the patches and make the bowl look like the patches never happened. Three coats of spray lacquer later (that all but disappeared into the extremely dry wood) I decided it was done. Now, I’m starting to ask myself what would happen if I dyed the vertical pieces a different color, or the horizontal pieces a different color. This is how it starts! Stay tuned, because I have a 1/4″ piece of plywood in the garage already…
This is what I came out with. 13″ wide at the top and about 6″ tall. I really like the finished product, but realize that if I ever had to sell the thing, I’d end up working for about .50 an hour!
The basket pattern, made by the simple process of adding a strip of plywood, actually turns out looking really good!From the top, hopefully you can get a sense for how big this one turned out.
Awhile back, I turned a simple bowl out of willow that was about as basic as you can get. bland, no real grain in the wood, and the inside was nothing but a horrible collection of torn up end grain that simply couldn’t be sanded away. After about an hour of sanding, with little progress to show, I decided to toss it in the heap and forget about it. Since I’ve been experimenting with color lately, I was looking for something that I could practice on, without having to waste a “good” piece of wood. Enter the crappy willow mistake…
I decided to play around with the iridescent paint again, only this time see if straight acrylic paint would show through the colors. Since the coloring technique is called “cosmic cloud”, I figured why not try to make a nebula inside the bowl? Gotta say, this one turned out WAY better than I ever expected.
Here are the before and after shots:
Here’s the under side of the bowl. Nothing really to look at and the inside looked the same, except for the damage done to the end grain while turning.
Here’s what the inside looks like, after applying the paints.
Space bowl #1 – after. There is still some work to do around the rim to clean up the errant paint that got under the tape, but it is exactly the effect I was going for.
Earlier this month, I made a shallow dish, but thought it looked plain. To fix that little issue, I decided to try a paint dipping technique, courtesy of a couple thousand You Tube videos. If done right, it will make some really cool swirls on the item being dipped. If done wrong, it will make a gloppy, sticky mess! For a first attempt, there was much in the way of learning lessons to be taken away:
DON’T put any finish on the piece before you dip it, because the paint may not stick.
DON’T put too much of any one color in/on the water, or you’ll get a piece fully dominated by that color.
DON’T use a container for dipping that you ever want to use for anything else, because it will be completely ruined – OR – make sure you put some kind of liner in before you fill it with water.
DON’T use a container with a small surface area to save paint. You’ll end up with a splotchy spot because there won’t be enough paint on the water surface to cover the whole project.
DON’T save time by using cold tap water, the paint won’t disperse enough if you do.
DO wear gloves of some kind, or you’ll get spray paint all over your hands.
DO keep a supply of mineral spirits readily available to clean up your hands because you stupidly think your hands won’t get dirty. They will. Almost instantly!
DO figure out a way to attach some kind of handle to your piece. It’ll keep your fingers out of the way of the paint and avoid a blank spot on the final product where your fingers were clamped on.
DO wear some kind of breathing protection, because when spray paint hit water, it will quickly become breathable. No coroner wants to see Technicolor lungs when you get to their table…
Here’s the final product. I’m thinking the next wig stand that I make for the cancer patients will have a much different visual appearance.
Top view. Kinda like the randomness of the colors.bottom view. Not the lack of paint on the left hand side. It’s actually a dull purple.
I found a natural edge bowl that I had started and set aside. I think it is willow. I remember turning it when it was very wet and setting it aside to let it finish drying. To my surprise, it barely warped and only had a teeny tiny crack in one part that was easily fixed. The final thickness ended up being about 1/8″. Not too bad!
The more I look at it, though, it looks awful white and awful plain. Perhaps it needs a little color. Hum… what to do with it now…
This is really thin! Not quite to the point where light will show through it, but very, very close.
Many months ago, I had an odd shaped piece of red oak and decided to see what I could make out of it. It turned (no pun intended) into a vase. Oak is not my favorite wood to turn, but I was pleased with the shape, so I kept it out of the burn pile, set it aside, and figured at some point I’d finish it.
A Month or so ago, I decided to add some color to it. Since it was red oak, I thought I’d dye it red and see what I got. I filled the vacuum chamber with red dye and left it under pressure for three or four days. When I pulled it out, it looked like a really dark red. PERFECT! I let it dry for a couple days, then put it back on the lathe and figured I’d sand it smooth, since the dye raised the grain. After a couple minutes sanding, it became clear that the dye barely went into the wood. Back to the drawing board…
Since the vacuum chamber was a bust, I decided to see what the pressure pot would do. I filled the inside of the vase with dye, then put it under pressure. After the first day, the dye level was down about an inch, so I figured I’d just keep it under pressure until I could see the dye coming through the outside of the vase. Each day for a week, I checked the dye level and topped it off. After a full week, I took it out of the pressure pot and let it dry.
Below is what I ended with after another round of sanding. I was hoping that the dye would have been more “stripey”, only coming through between the growth rings, but I think I like the way this turned out. Makes me wonder what I could get with a lighter wood like maple or sycamore. Hum…
