The president’s challenge for my woodturning club this month is something with flowers.  I suppose that’s to make everyone feel all spring like inside.  So far, the projects that have come in have been pretty standard as far as people either making some kind of wooden flower, or painting a flower on another piece and calling it a day.  I’ve had a project in my mind for awhile now, but didn’t really have a reason to try it, so I figured this challenge would “force” me to try.

My thought was to see if I could mimic the look of stained glass on a woodturning project, by using colored casting resin.  How hard would that be, right?  All I’d have to do was carve out where I wanted the resin to go, pour it in there, then let it dry and finish up the turning.  Easy-Peasy, lemon-squeezy!

No.  Not easy, no peasy, and nothing the least bit squeezy, lemon scented or otherwise.  There were only problems.

• I chose a bowl blank of red oak, which is about the least carvable wood there is.  That’s on me.  To fix that, I turned the outside shape of the bowl, then cut the top off the bowl blank and figured I’d just use a jigsaw to cut the pieces out of the thin, flat top, instead of carving them all into the blank.
• The jig saw work was pretty uneventful, except I realized that the pattern I was using wouldn’t look the least bit like stained glass when the resin was poured in.  Since there was no lines between the individual petals, it would just look like big colored blobs, so I decided to only to the tips of the flower petals, make a circle to fill in for the middle, then use a woodburner and dye to do the rest of the petals.
• When I went to put the lid back on the bowl, I realized the bowl blank wasn’t all the way dry.  Why is that a problem?  Well, in the ten hours or so that the “lid” was off the bowl, the lid warped AND the bowl warped, really bad.  When it came time to glue the lid back on, there was suddenly an 1 1/4″ gap between the two.  I figured out how to use the tailstock from the lathe to press it back together, but right as it was about to fully compress onto the top of the bowl, there was a loud crack.  I’m not exactly sure where the wood broke, because I can’t see it anywhere, but it’s there somewhere, just waiting for the humidity to drop down so it can split in two.
• The casting resin didn’t want to cooperate, either.  No matter how much I taped the bottom of the holes, there always seemed to be a little bit that seeped out.  Some started leaking in a couple minutes while the resin was still wet, but others waited until I had turned the lights out before making their escape.  When I went to do the sanding, I saw the dimples in some holes and empty sockets in the others.  I refilled the empty holes, but didn’t have the will to go back and fix the dimples.
• There isn’t an even surface on this thing!  The top has several waves where the wood warped, and the actual outside shape of the bowl is actually oval, not round, because of how much it had warped.  All of the final sanding had to be done by hand, so it’s only sanded to about 220 grit.  There are spots on the outside end grain that could pretty much grate cheese.
• I was so done with this bowl by the time the glue dried on the lid, I actually forgot to go back and add the wood dye to the flower petals, so these are the worst looking flowers that never grew in real life.  Ick!  Just ICK!

End the end, I’m hoping this will at least stay in one piece until the next club meeting, so I can get credit for having completed the challenge.  Beyond that, it may just have an “accident” on the way home from the club meeting.  I could easily see it get caught in a crosswind as I roll the window down, sadly being sucked out of the car at the exact moment I’m going over a bridge with a fast moving river below…