Project Completion photos-the yarn bowl, the spurtles, and salt cellars

Hi Everyone,

I've had a number of smaller projects that I've brought to completion today so let's take a look at some photos:

Spurtles

The spurtles are finished. I've made them out of some scrap lumber and several tree branch sections I had ear marked for spoons. They are approximately 13" long and I've created substantial handles on them to make them comfortable to use. And two of them are shaped like thistles. All of them are finished with salad bowl varnish and this needs about a week of curing before I turn them over to the new owner who will be incorporating them into a Christmas project (more about that in another posting):

The wood species are from left to right: red oak, mineral stained poplar, red oak, and poplar:

Salt cellars

Earlier this summer I demonstrated a project using scrap lumber and jam jars. Put them together and you get a salt cellar. The jam jar is an 8oz wide mouth Ball jam jar which are readily found here in the US-and I suspect any wide mouth jar would work well for this project. These were all made with small scrap wood pieces. The lids are black walnut, maple, tiger wood, and laminated hickory and jatoba wood:

This is a side view of the tiger wood jar:

And these will be donated to a Christmas sale later next month. More about that later on.


The Yarn Bowl

Well, this is finished too and I must say I'm not very happy about the bowl. It's is large and rather crude looking and the added stain ruined what little merit it had.

Now I'm not going to go off on a rant about the evils of stained wood. I've made most of my furniture in my home and almost all of it is stained pine or other wood. I think staining wood for furniture is entirely appropriate. And there are a lot of wood artists who stain wood and use paint and other means of coloring to beautiful effect. This bowl isn't in that category. I think it looked fine in it's natural state but the owner of the piece wanted it stained a mahogany color and so I did it. In retrospect I should have declined as this is simply a large pine bowl that is stained red. Here are the finish photos:

I'm never doing this again.

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Ok, I have another scrap wood project and I need to figure out a way to cut a large tree trunk into sections to get it ready for turning and I don't have a chain saw. More on that soon.

Take care and enjoy the autumn.

See you all soon,

VW