Still cleaning stuff up, still finding forgotten projects that need to be finished.  In this particular case, it was a roughed out honey locust bowl blank that had tried to hide under the workbench.  When I fished it out, I noticed it had several large cracks where the wood had started to split, no doubt it’s feeble attempt to make itself less attractive and thereby less likely to be turned anymore.  This is very, very common with honey locust, mostly because that wood is sneaky and cowardly.  It could have also had something to do with the idiot who roughed out the blank knowing it was extremely wet, but didn’t take any precautions to seal the grain.  DOH!

I decided to fill the cracks with resin, then go ahead and finish the bowl, so I started looking through all the color pigments that could be added to the epoxy.  Given the unique color of the honey locust heartwood and the lighter, almost yellow sapwood, I knew it would be a challenge.  Purple, pink, and red wouldn’t blend very well.  yellow would look way too bright next to the heartwood and get lost in the sapwood.  Green is always ugly.  Light blue looks too unnatural. dark blue too dark, and royal blue to cartoon-ish.  Orange would fight the sapwood color.  Black would accentuate the cracks, but in a bad way.  White looks like it was meant to be something else…  Nothing looked like it was a good match, so I settled on no color.  Since casting resin dries crystal clear, the actual color of the surrounding wood shows through (to some degree) and the resin ends up kinda looking like sap that’s been “frozen” in the wood.  In the end, I kinda like the way it turned out!