The maple tree outside my shop door was the inspiration for this turned pot which I call “Fall Colors”. This may be the first of new series called the Turning Of The Seasons. I also dabbled with making a video of the techniques I used to achieve these effects. I just couldn’t find much on YouTube about coloring so I had to arrive at my own techniques. i would like to thank Larry Moser who lent me his Sony Bloggie video camera for this test video. I had no directions so the video got shot in vertical mode instead of landscape — but it was only a test. View the video:More Views and comments

As promised, a new piece today — and of course it is colored. I hadn’t used any purple in my projects and it was time to give that a shot. It wasn’t really bright enough in my light box to bring out the blues peeking out from the purple color in a tie-dyed effect, but they are there and it is a very nice touch. I tried using a bit of fabric dye (Jacquard Procion MX Dye) to get a nice cobalt blue since I had not been able to really get the depth of color by mixing. It worked great but I found that they were a bit harder to blend than regular wood dyes. I also sealed it with a coat of spray shellac before applying the lacquer. May not have been a good idea as I kept getting fisheyes in the lacquer. It may not have been the reason but I don’t think I’ll try it again on a nice piece. As an accent the knob on top of the lid is purple heart and although it looks brown now, it should start reverting to purple in a few days.

On this project L time to turn vase — about one hour;  time to color — about 2.5 hours;  time to finish — about 3.5 hours. It almost makes me reconsider doing these colored turnings with the high sheen. It’s too bad I like them so much.

I took the Going Green piece up to the Green Phoenix this weekend and already had separation anxiety before leaving. She loved the colored pieces as do I so I needed to replace that one with another green piece – this one titled “River Bottom” to compliment the “Ocean Bottom” piece I did a while back (this is also up at the Phoenix). The Ocean Bottom was shade of blue and green but the rivers around here are green and murky so that’s what came out of this piece of locust. It already had dark areas which I accented with greens and browns. The primary colors were water based dyes and the olive green colors were created by rubbing alcohol based dye over the water dye to do some blending.

And speaking of green this one was turned while the wood was still green so it will sit on my bench for a while so I can be sure it won’t crack as it finishes drying. That shouldn’t take long since I turned it quite thin. More Views and comments