Pencil Holder 2 (or how I learned to hate chiseling)

I’ve been working on this for about 9 months – off and on, obviously.
“What could be easier” I thought – I just have to chisel out a big hole in this lump of olive wood that had been sitting there for a year waiting. Well, in my limited experience, just about everything is easier! So I’d revisit it once in a while – sharpen up the chisels and have a bash at it. I don’t understand – it’s really quite soft wood when you sand at it, but it doesn’t want to chisel. After a while I’d give up – “I must be missing something”, I kept thinking. I guess what I was missing is that it takes a lot of work.
I decided, a couple of weeks ago, that I was going to finish it – that’s when I discovered that wasps had just started building a nest in it! Wasps like my workshop. I considered ways of incorporating the nest into the design. I even considered finishing it and sending it, nest and all, to my least favourite politician – that would be a shock (and awe) when the grubs hatched out. In the end I just scraped the stuff out and set about finishing it.
I wanted to leave as many of the subtle “lumps and bumps” as possible – so it’s all hand-sanded (easy, but gums up the paper something rotten). The pictures don’t really do justice to the amazing range of colours and shapes in there – that, of course, is nature’s doing, rather than mine.

Olive – oil finish.