There is some kind of tree that drops these small, spiky balls every fall and they are a complete mystery to me. Where I grew up, these things didn’t exist, but now, they seem to be all over Blo/No. I found out they’re called Sweet Gum trees and they’re common just about everywhere throughout the mid-west. For being so common, I’m still struggling to figure out why they drop out so many of those spiky balls. I swear they don’t EVER break down. They cover the ground every fall, yet the tree seems to keep a bunch in reserve, stuck in their branches until spring , just in case they feel like being vicious at some point in the future. When the snow melts, those pointy land minds are the first thing that can be seen. Weird thing, is they’re still hard and pointy, even after the snow melts and the spring rains come. I’m sure the biologists have a very scientific explanation for their function, but I think it’s pretty obvious they only exist to keep people from walking barefoot in the yard. I have resigned myself to accepting that this is yet another example that god has a sick sense of humor. Like putting the knees on the wrong side of a flamingo’s legs, or making the duck billed platypus from a bunch of left over animal parts, I’m pretty sure god decided to cross a tree’s seed pod with a sea urchin, then sit back just to see what happens.

There’s one of these enigmas growing in my daughter’s front yard. True to it’s design, it diligently drops it’s little care packages from hell all over the yard, the front walk, the street, cars, small animals, and anything else it can locate. A couple of years ago, I picked up a couple handfuls of these little marvels and packed them away for a “someday” project, not knowing what that project would be.

Flash forward to this past week, I was in the garage, looking for something when I stumbled across the now forgotten package and decided today is someday. I unwrapped the spike balls and to absolutely no one’s surprise, they were dry and still spiky and sharp. I decided if these little mysteries of nature had such an aversion to following the whole “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” mandate, I’d just help them out and immortalize them in resin. Initially, I was going to set them in red resin, thinking blood red would be a good color, but opted for an iridescent deep blue instead. An old, cheap, cereal bowl for a mold, some creative stacking of old bits of wood to keep the spike balls pushed to the edges, a pressure pot, and 12 hours of patience and my blank was ready for turning.

The turning was surprisingly easy, since the shape of the cereal bowl was just about perfect. Turning epoxy is a horribly messy task, but the new dust collector did a pretty decent job keeping up with the spider web like strands that come off the blank. 30 minutes of turning gave way to at least 45 minutes of sanding, but the final result was definitely worth all the effort!