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#1 ·
Tania Kovats' TREE



At 17m long, TREE is London's Natural History Museum's largest botanical specimen. It is a wafer-thin shaving through the entire 200 year old tree from roots to branch tips. The video shows Tania Kovats' journey through finding the tree, deciding how to bring it down, learning how to have it resawn, CNC machined thin, and dried, and the ultimate hanging on the ceiling of the mezzanine gallery behind the Central Hall. Quite some board feet she left behind at the mill. She had never worked in wood before.

Along with the tree installation are a museum-like presentation of its pressed and dried leaves, and samples of lichen, moss, and a collection of insects that were found in and on the living tree.
 
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#4 ·
What an interesting concept. It's neat to see how someone outside of the norm sees an object frequently used. It was a bit sad to see such a magnificent tree felled, but as the artist stated, she was trying to preserve it for many years to come.

Wouldn't it be interesting to see what wood artists around the globe could create from this one tree?
 
#5 ·
I thought Tania Kovats was a tree species. Silly me. I wanted the video to go on more.

You are probably too busy to watch much TV, but I rented a movie from netflixs called called Rivers and Tides (2003) Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time, here is the exerpt:

This amazing documentary from Thomas Riedelsheimer won the Golden Gate Award Grand Prize for Best Documentary at the 2003 San Francisco International Film Festival. The film follows renowned sculptor Andy Goldsworthy as he creates with ice, driftwood, bracken, leaves, stone, dirt and snow in open fields, beaches, rivers, creeks and forests. With each new creation, he carefully studies the energetic flow and transitory nature of his work.

This movie is pure zen, and the guy is a stark raving genius. Just wanted to share.
 
#8 ·
Everyone!!! Take the time to watch this video. It's great! I do have to admit though that I was wondering where all the rest of the lumber went after they selected the slices for the display. I could keep my hands busy for a lifetime with that much Oak!
 
#18 ·
What to do with old drawers...

This is a few years old now, but I just found it last night, and thought it was clever and attractive in an eclectic way. The two-woman team of wis design shop flea markets for old, abandoned, and out-of-style drawers, then build custom melamine chests to fit them in a project they call Decades.













More of their modern funiture here, with a project similar to Decades being Collect, but with newly created drawers.
 
#19 ·
Very slick. I like how they use the melamine to produce that white space to show off the detail of the various drawers. Concept similar to patch quilting where the patterns will all be different and blend, even though no two patterns are the same. Great find and thanks for sharing.

David
 
#27 ·
Absolutely amazing, all-wood, construction vehicle toys

Anyone know Japanese? These are from YouTube user kinohaguruma, and they're a young child's dream come true. These are the kinds of things I always wanted to build out of wood growing up, and still do, but I also recognize the monumental effort required now. I chose 3 of them for the post here, each getting more complex and awesome, but there are more at the link above.





 
#47 ·
Harald Huf's 1:6 scale, twin jet-powered, r/c Sukhoi Su-27 jet fighter

I can't believe the amount of work some people can accomplish. This is an absolutely monumental build of a Sukhoi Su-27, aka "Flanker-B" that mostly uses wood for the mold making, but even that is pretty solid craftsmanship. I think the rest is interesting/impressive to anyone who makes, creates, or builds anything.

I thought I was done clicking through pages of pictures at least a dozen times, but there were always more. He did all the wood and aluminum/hand hammered rivets work - starting about here - just to make a mold so he could create hollow, fiberglass shells, as seen in part on this page, but then there are endless more things, like all the mechanics of the wheels and their hydraulics, enclosing doors, the flaps, all the electronics, and of course, the twin jet engines. He even built molds for and roto-molded the 4 gas tanks.

I don't think most people are going to click through the literally 87 pages, and look at over 850 800×600 photos, but if you're interested, they start here. There's also an index of all the pages here. Most of it is in German, with some translations scattered haphazardly about, mostly through the first half of the pages.

I'm posting here just a few selected photos I thought gave a sense of the build, though of course with these encompassing less than 1/20th of the photos on the site, it really does leave a tremendous amount out, especially the nit-picky details stuff, as I went more for pictures that showed stages of the build (i.e. not many pictures of vacuum pressing parts, or molds being built, or tons of prefabbed little panels or pieces laid out on a table). I did my best :) His video links are all dead now, but here it is in flight on YouTube, and here's an early test of the hydraulics.

































































































 
#65 ·
The Wych Elm Project

A couple nights back while on another of my serendipitous online adventures through the world of trees and wood, I happened upon a blog with a post entitled The Edinburgh Cabinet,RBGE wych elm project. It had some nice pictures of a cabinetmaker and some drawer fronts he'd carved with a scene of Edinburgh, Scotland (click for larger views):





I love how the wood grain creates a kind of blanket over the image, like the radial glow of a sunrise or sunset coloring the sky, far more visible in the full-size view of the second image (just click it to see it bigger). In my late night stupor I failed to notice many important things about the article, such as that the man in the pictures was none other than Chris Holmes himself - the man whose blog I was reading (I thought it was just a blogger reporting on the piece and artist) - and the "RBGE" in the title. Too, I failed entirely to notice that his Edinburgh Cabinet was part of "The Wych Elm Project." I just assumed the artist was referring to it the way many of us do our projects, after the particular wood used in the making. For example, I've had a "eucalyptus cup project." Here's another view:



Flash forward to yesterday. I walked to my local hardware store, something I've taken to doing since I got back from the holidays in an effort to get more exercise. It's a fantastic walk, full of beautiful trees great and small, both in yards (sometimes behind fence walls) and lining the streets. The variety is staggering: bald cypress, pink honey-myrtle, palo verde, Chinese elm, American sweet gum, pride of Madeira (more a huge, weed-like shrub with large purple flowers), purple leaf plums, European olives, bamboo (some about 3-stories tall in mini forests), eucalyptus, enormous figs larger than the houses beneath them, naked coral, and many more. There's always something I missed, and this time was no expection; I found 2 large species I hadn't noticed before, and noticed this time as one is full of plum-sized fruit, and the other has exploded in yellow, pea-sized balls that are themselves popping out in yellow stamens in all directions. They smell deliciously like honey. All of these trees have wildly contrasting looks.

Palo verde has smooth, bright green bark and long, willowy, hair-like branches by the thousands that hang down everywhere making the whole tree look soft. Olives with their crazy gnarled bark and dark hollows everywhere look dead and haunted. The sweet gums right now are leafless for the most part, but some are covered everywhere in countless "gumballs" - spiky seed pods about the size and shape of a large shooter marble - hanging down like cherries on thin stems, making the trees look obsessively dressed in Christmas ornaments. Even the one naked coral with it's big leaves and pretty bark is loaded with huge burls. It's definitely not the standard oak and pine forests I grew up in, where the differences between the trees are much, much more subtle. I brought my camera, so it took me about 45 minutes to walk the 6 blocks or so :) I returned with nearly 300 photos of trees and plants, as well as some brackets, screws, and tubing from the store for a lathe project TBA soon (hopefully!). All in all another great little walk. You can look through all the pictures here.

One tree in particular - a huge one 60' or greater in each instance - flanks the streets in several places and commands attention. I've only taken notice of it since late last year and it's had no leaves, fruit, or seeds on it in all this time, so I've had no clue what it might be, nor how to look it up. Today, however, reviewing my very high resolution photos (12MP) at home, I saw spots of green. Zooming way in, I saw them: samaras. Samaras are simply seeds with papery wings, like those of maple trees, or in this case, with the seed central to a ring-shaped wing, elms. I looked through more pics and found more spots of green - leaves! They were definitely elm leaves. So now I know what those trees are, but the exact species of the 30 to 40 known will require further investigation. Here is one of my former mystery trees, now discovered to be elms:



I decided to do a bit of that further investigation right away. There was that deeply-furrowed bark that might help narrow it down, after all. That's when I accidentally found my way right back to The Wych Elm Project ("wych" is pronounced like "which" or "witch."). Wych elms (Ulmus glabra) are one of a couple dozen trees native to Scotland. The wych elm in the project was a 200 year old elm at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (that was the RBGE in the aforementioned Chris Holmes' post title) in Scotland that sadly contracted dutch elm disease, a beetle-carried disease that quickly kills certain elms and is currently ravaging the genus. In 2003 it was decided to bring it down for the safety of garden guests. Ian Edwards, Head of Interpretation and Exhibitions at RBGE pushed for what we'd all dream would happen - for the wood to be given to master craftsman, cabinetmakers, and artists in Scotland - 25 in all - to be made into all manner of human artistic endeavors, that it might live on. In 2008 the wood was given out, and in 2009, an exhibition was held. The RBGE put together a nice little film about it that incorporates some of the artists and some of the folklore of the wych elm, which I'll embed here:



I do wish they would have featured more of the artists in the video, and more of the finished pieces. The YouTube video mentions "pottery, paper, jewellery [sic], boxes and toys, as well as a fishing rod," but these are not in the video. There is a bit more about it, with a picture of a few of the pieces on display in the John Hope Gateway in another post on Chris Holmes' blog. Further information on page 10 of the PDF file from the RBGE here, and I've found an additional 18 photos of the project's pieces on Flickr. Oh, and here's the RBGE's Wych Elm Project page. Almost forgot!

And now I understand Holmes' Edinburgh Cabinet piece. The cabinet is made from the wood of the 200 year old giant, and the carving across its drawer fronts depicts the view of Edinburgh as seen from the vantage point of the original tree. Neat.
 
#66 ·
Great information, Gary!

Looking out of the window, into our back yard, I can see a half a dozen elm trees. One is over 50 years old. I dread the day it succumbs to dutch elm.

Lew
 
#70 ·
Pictorial Webster's: Inspiration to Completion

While not particularly woodworking, he uses wood in many of his jigs and clamps and presses. Too, he calls his operation "Quercus Press," and Quercus, as we all know is the genus of the oak trees. It looks like the covers are glued over white oak boards as well. Moreover, though, this video is simply a maker's dream. From the old linotype machine whirring and clanking away to line up type as he presses keys, to the vaults of old engravings he gained access to, to the many clever, old-world machines and techniques he and his helpers used to print up his tome, my eyes were wide with info overload and joy through the whole thing. I suspect many of you will enjoy it every bit as much, and so I share.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=5228616&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Pictorial Webster's: Inspiration to Completion from John Carrera on Vimeo.

Deluxe editions - 26 in all - went for $4600 a pop. He had a few cheaper alternatives from there, all still expensive. Affordable reproductions - regular, machine-made books with reproduced contents - are only about $35.
 
#88 ·
What a fine artist does with branches

I went to art school, and this kind of work was the domain of the "fine artists," who make abstract art to express ideas without getting literal about it. I.e. maybe they were inspired by an apple, but there may be no actual representation of an apple anywhere in the piece, and the point was for you to find your own interpretation, which probably wouldn't contain an apple.

Much of the time, we in the computer animation major, and even those in more closely related majors, like illustration, wouldn't know what we were looking at, and wouldn't be moved in any way, but once in awhile something spoke to us across the divide. Some things didn't make sense, weren't useful, didn't depict anything in particular to us, and wouldn't likely be found in our homes, but we just liked them. They were somehow "really cool." That's how I feel about these creations by Japanese artist Naoko Ito, for her "Urban Nature 2009" series:



It looks like the branch segments are just resting inside, sometimes with smaller jars in the jars to act as support platforms. While there's no particular 'reason' for this - it's not furniture, organizational help, something you would give as a gift, or any of most of the rest of the kinds of things we make - it's just really neat to look at. It makes things swirl around in my mind, like that we do actually sell bottles and jars of tree products, often not much more refined than this (powdered bark and roots, e.g., like homeopathic stuff, or even just cinnamon, the sticks of which are curled 'quills' of the bark).



There are a couple more examples here.

Viewing these creations, I seem to like the play of glass and wood together, and even the specific concept of glass jars in wood working. I start pulling it into my world, thinking about organizers (always more organizers!) that would use jars, but could be more natural in their makeup - a 'tree' of organization. That starts to take on structure in my mind and I start to think about things like flat-wall cabinetry that can pull out into a tree of pivoting pieces, to organically display the jars and their parts in a beautiful way - something even someone who doesn't get the fine art aspect would still find themselves stopping to look at and saying "Wow, that is really cool."

This is why, though even in art school, when many of us (even me sometimes) were saying "I just don't get that major at all", I'd still usually be glad it was around. There can be a lot of hidden inspiration in the weird stuff, and in some cases, I don't know that I would have found it on my own.
 
#95 ·
Making a Jarvi Bench, with Mike Jarvi

A friend sent this to me, and it is simply a joy to watch. I didn't even realize it was almost 16 minutes long! It's a lot of fun, and for me, it had a lot of "Now what on earth is he doing here?" moments that were followed up by "Oh! Brilliant!" resolutions. I like that in my process videos :) This guy has some serious tools and space, relative to me, and works magics with a Wood-Mizer bandmill. I have most of that stuff in half or quarter the scale (but no bandmill), and probably more like 1/10th for the workspace. Alas… Maybe I can make a doll house version.

 
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