I made some little things in the shop today and I am sharing them all with you. The square one is about 4.5” square the others are about 3” wide.. so fairly small.

The ones with light-on-dark are oak laminated on top of mahogany and the dark-on-light are walnut burl laminated on maple.

I like this style a lot so I plan on making quite a bit more of them. I have a lot of thin scraps that are just perfect for it.

This is Tamboti, which I have never used before… but oh boy! I could use it every day, it was one of the best woods I’ve ever worked with. So hard and waxy and gorgeous grain omg.

It is 6” tall, 3” wide and 2” thick (when I started).. the carving is about an inch thick, a little less.

This was made for my shop and not for a particular customer. Gearing up for Valentine’s day and romantic things. I’m pretty in love with it.

After the amazing response I had to the full size periodic table, I was talking about it with a friend of mine and we had this idea. How fun!

These have immediately jumped to the top of the list, along with the periodic table, as popular items in my shop. Excellent.

the pale ones are maple veneer and the darker ones are cherry. I’m in love with the cherry and ordered more cherry plywood.. :)

They’re about four inches tall, the squares are about 2 inches tall.

This is kind of fun… a periodic table! :)

It is carved into Baltic Birch with a maple veneer and is fairly large… about 36 inches wide and 20 inches tall. Each element is about 1.5” square.

Usually I paint my engraving type things but I thought this stood out really well all on its own.. you can clearly read it in person and I like the natural feel it has. :)

I’m going to make a few more of these, smaller.

Some Koi dancing around water carved into a piece of Michigan cherry… I think it is Michigan cherry. By serendipity, the fish ended up just outside of the heartwood. It really looks like I glued it on in person.. love it.

This was kind of fun.. I was rummaging around my computer over the weekend trying to get my designs together and I found this one.. dated from 2007?! I don’t remember what I would have used it for.. or why I have it.. but at some point I rendered it, so cool.

This is the same wood as the Big Giraffes. .. same log.. what a different a part of the log makes huh.

The carving did not go quite as I had hoped it would, the slab did not cooperate that much. Oh well. I like how the carving goes right into the bark, though. I saturated the bark with CA so hopefully it will stay there.

If you like it pay attention to my Etsy shop because I think I’m going to heavily discount it. A few people have mentioned doing some carvings with laminated wood and I think this would be the PERFECT design to try it out on. So perhaps I will do that.

At any rate, I thought it was only fair to show you all some of the best I’ve done and some that don’t work out quite to plan.

You all likely saw the little giraffes a few days ago.. this is the big one. The little ones went over so well I decided to push it a little and I had this slab just waiting. It is ten inches wide, so that’s how wide I made it. It’s about 22” tall and 6/4.

I’m not entirely certain what kind of wood it is. The person who gave it to me (and who milled it from his property) claimed it to be oak, and it was very heavily weathered so I wasn’t sure. Obviously it is not. Didn’t smell like anything in particular and doesn’t quite look like anything I’ve worked with before. But it sure is pretty! :)

We’ll see if I do any more of these on a BIG scale… they aren’t really worth the profit margin, sadly. (It took a long time to carve) But it was really fun and quite beautiful.

Realised that I never shared this one. It is one of my favourites. The tree is simple v-carving into a piece of reclaimed wood.. used to be a bleacher in the swimming pool room at work. That definitely lent to some of the colouration in the wood.

After planing it, I covered the surface with some shellac and then carved it. This let me watercolour on it and keep the seeping to a minimum. Sanded it to 600 grit and then gave it almost a dozen coats of shellac, sanding to 800 in-between. After it was all said and done, a couple of coats of lacquer and there we have it.

About 9 inches wide.

I did a couple of variations on this, but this is by far my favourite. I like the colour scheme, and I really like it with this wood.

I worked on a new design this past week—something a bit different! :) I’ve had a few requests for some more light-hearted, kid-responsive designs.. which are not really my thing.. so this is kind of a middle ground.

Since it is a new design, I was pretty excited and I made two. I thought I would show off a little of the CNC magic that happens once you put effort into a design. And how each piece is still quite different, and has its own charm.

The red piece is part of a block of bloodwood, and is about three inches wide. I kept the block fairly thick.. I like how it sits up on its own.

The brown piece is a piece of worm-eaten oak that I milled myself from a log I found on the side of the road a couple of years ago. I filled it in with epoxy (and some glitter) and it is now quite stable. It is almost 4 inches wide.

I LOVE the contrast between the two woods – a fine exotic and a reclaimed worm-eaten local piece.. They will be sold separately.

I spent a fair portion of the day carving a big one (10 inches wide, 23 inches tall) out of another piece of oak that was locally milled. It’s not done yet, though, so you don’t get to see it yet. :)

You may remember my other spalted maple bowl—this is from the same log. I played around with the vac chamber a little bit. Gave it a dip in blue and red and kept it streaky.

The base is pretty thick on this because it is really spunky and I wanted it to stay together.

It was just messing around, nothing particularly special. I took some pictures of the tooling involved in my lathe work, which is in a blog post.

This is made out of ipê. It is about 5.4 inches wide and 12 inches tall. It is a new design I was playing around with this past weekend and I have been looking forward to carving it all week. A friend of mine gave me some pieces of ipê decking that was leftover from a project his dad did years ago and was excited to see what I might do with it. Hard to come up with something special for it because the wood was all 3/4 and typically my 3d work is much thicker.

It was absolutely wonderful to carve and I look forward to using it again! I have a fair amount of this wood, so look forward to more soon.

Put it up in my Etsy shop, we’ll see if anybody wants it.

I posted a little video yesterday of a carving I was doing yesterday—you can see it HERE.

this is the final product. It is very much a “doodle” – nothing particularly fancy and I didn’t put too much effort into cleaning it up or doing intricate passes on it.

This is just a scrap piece of wood that used to be a bleacher seat years and years ago. It was a fun design and I may explore it more in the future. In the meantime, this one will be looking for a home – I bet it would look nice in a cabin or the office of an outdoors-y person. :)

I made this for the Frank Lloyd Wright design fun going on in the blogs. It’s also an exercise in playing around with my new bandsaw. The two kind of went hand in hand.

There’s a lot of rock maple in here, along with walnut, mahogany, cherry, osage orange, olivewood, redwood, bloodwood, zebrawood, paduak.. I think that’s it.. :)

It’s my first attempt at complicated segmenting so obviously I still have a lot to learn. It also was a little tricky to turn because I have to turn it without removing it from the chuck so the front and back are cut in the same go.

It’s about 6.5 inches in diameter and 2 inches tall. Built up a polish till it felt like glass.

For fun, I put it up for sale in my etsy shop. We’ll see if anybody wants it!

I had this log sitting in my pile for the better part of two years and I’ve always had a fondness for it.. I have no idea what kind of wood it is—“found on the side of the road wood”. It had a really big split going down one side, as you can clearly see.

I took the crack and filled it with a bunch of metal shavings from the other work that I do, and then filled the rest of it with fibreglass resin. I liked the fibreglass resin for this because it has a very warm tone to it that works really well with the colour of this wood. Rather than being simply clear.

Then turned it round and sliced it in half.. One became a bowl/container and the other a little bud vase. I like that you can clearly see light through the crack in the bowl and the vase is neat with its strange angle and size. I like it with a big, sturdy flower like I have shown in the pictures.

All I did was drill a hole and then epoxy a test tube in the hole. Easy enough.

the metal mixing is a technique I’ll use again for sure.

My buyers have recently asked for some things that are a little different from what I have been offering. I am of course, happy to indulge and explore. Since rock maple is my primary medium for anything whenever possible (due to having near 6,000 BF of it) I naturally started exploring ways to use rock maple for this project, too.

I has to be laminated because my lumber is all 4/4 and 2” wide. Perfect for stripping down into single pens but not quite right for anything bigger. The first few stoppers I turned were laminated of maple only, and while they ended up looking nice enough, they were kind of plain and well… boring to me. I played around with some angles, which I ultimately decided was awesome.

I then took some pieces of thin stock and placed it in random places of the blank. These two stoppers each have maple, and one also has cedar. This is precisely what I was looking for! I like the contrast of the band, and it is simple enough to do that it does not add any significant time to the production.

This will be part of a series where I will just take whatever appealing pieces thin scrap I have laying around and will add them into the blanks as I go and see what happens. Nice to have another item in the inventory and one that is a little more creative in the creation process than I usually need to be.

Turned this today. I have been trying a few new techniques and this was the first successful run. I had a fair amount of tearout, which I think is a combination of unfamiliar territory and cherry, which is a general pain to work with. (Though man, did the shop smell nice today! :) )

It’s about six inches in diameter and about two inches thick. I have no personal use for it- it’s off to the store. I’m sure somebody will give it a loving home.

Now that I kind of figured out what I’m doing I cannot WAIT to start doing more! I have plans! :)

This was a fun little project that I worked on in the middle of a couple of other big projects.

The maple came from a bunch of cut offs that a member of the Grand River Woodturning Guild gave me last week.. they were too punky for him to do anything with but I play with a rigid metal lathe and have been working in epoxy infusion.

Anyway.. this bowl was an exercise in spite.

I dipped the whole bowl in a purple dye and was going to infuse it—and thought I HAD infused it – to find out my vac chamber did not pull all night because I forgot to switch a valve. So what happened was it wicked up most of the water but none of the dye.. which means when I went to step 2, infuse with epoxy, it was not particular absorbent.

When turning it, it split in half and one half threw itself a good one hundred feet before landing. Upon getting to the interior it was also revealed to be … not purple! Bummer.

I sanded both halves flat and then glued a piece of walnut in the middle. Re-roughed it and then soaked it again in epoxy. Even then, a little bit of tearout—did I mentioned it was REALLY punky?

There’s a little bit of purple leftover… I could have gotten it out if I dug deeper, but I chose to keep this kind of thick for the sake of structural integrity, of which it is kind of lacking.

This is something that I did over the weekend. It was “a doodle”—it took me about 20 minutes to set up the program (from a line drawing) and then maybe an hour, hour and a half to cut out. It’s really shallow- the deepest cut is 0.75” – which facilitated in making it so quickly.

The wood is actually really fun. When we moved into our current building a year and a half ago, I found some old bleachers that were by the long-since-filled-in swimming pool. They were painted several times and I planed one of them. Hiding underneath the ugly paint was this beautiful Southern Yellow Pine. It’s got huge, open grain but is crazy dense and heavy. It’s pretty awesome. It eventually led me on my journey to find out where it came from and I eventually discovered that my building used to be a lumber yard back in the day and it had two special imports/exports: rock maple and SYP.

Anyway—it’s about 10 inches wide. I’ve already sold one and I’m making another one because the interest in this particular design is fairly high.

This is one of my latest. I was encouraged by some local Lumberjocks to post it so here it is. ;)

The block is Poplar and about 9” wide, 4” thick and 13” long.

Once it was finished, I had a little issue with some of the corners being fuzzy – Poplar is not very friendly to rotary tools. Scott and the guys at Woodcraft here in Grand Rapids spent the better part of 20 minutes running around the store helping me find the best tool to clean it up (sandpaper wasn’t cutting it). Finally settled on a .25” ball diamond burr – works great. Then it was just applying lacquer until the surface was shiney all over (due to the crazy way I am exposing grain, some areas soaked it in more than others)

Kind of sad that I am now out of this wood but also kind of happy because man does Poplar smell foul.

This is a significantly less traditional item that I made a while ago. I had this piece of oak that wasn’t quite big enough for anything useful but was too thick to justify cutting in half for regular stock. So I cut it into two pieces length wise and took one piece and carved this case into it. I then found a pretty piece of wood that was roughly the same width and laminated it in-between the oak. I think it is Padauk but I’m not 100% sure.

The hole is about 2.5” D and it is roughly six inches tall.

It took .. a while … to cut out the vase but I was also using a 1mm cutter. so there’s that. It was done more for playing around with the art than intending to sell them because it is not time effective (at least on this tiny scale)