Today I am off to visit with the apothecary and I was able to get this piece done. It is a small piece of that spalted oak and I didn’t want to waste it so I glued it to a chunk o’ cherry and went at it. There is a band of Seattle’s Best #5 (dark roast coffee) separating the cherry from the oak and it looked suspiciously like walnut so I put a walnut spindle on to match. I do wish I had also but one of those bands at the top where the cherry lid meets but I just ran out of time — funny how that happens even when you have nothing but time but I had another bowl I wanted to finish coloring to take with me and I had to make a choice.

As promised, the willow pot that got colored. Actually it got recolored, the first dye job was too much of a bright red and looked a bit garish or maybe juvenile. Unfortunately I didn’t think of that until I already had a couple of coats of lacquer on it. I sanded back the lacquer a bit and then wiped down with lacquer thinner and rubbed alcohol based blue indigo dye on hoping to get a shade of purple. What I actually got was another smoky ember effect which honestly looks better than purple would have. Not sure about the lid yet — I’ll have to look at it a few more days yet. Maybe a natural wood wood be better.

I have so many projects going on at once that sometimes I lose track of what I had in mind for a certain piece. I feel driven like I’m just on a long weekend and need to get as much as I can in before going back to work. Eventually I’ll accept that every day is a weekend and I can relax a bit more.

Well, it is actually more of that cedar. I wanted to see how it would take dye — and it takes it fine. I have found some wood very hard to dye but cedar isn’t one of them obviously. I left the inside unfinished because some people like that cedar smell and I shouldn’t get any moths in there. The lid is mahogany and the spindle is a piece of ash dyed with ink. Diameter is about 7″ and height about 8″ to the top of the spindle. About 8 coats of lacquer — this one needed to shine to bring out that flame look.

I was running short on wood inside the shop and it was way too cold to be outside with the chainsaw so I worked with what I could find. This piece of walnut evolved after cutting away all the junk and working within the bounds of the shape available. There were some cracks in it but I decided to abandon the CA glue fix as it tends to stain the wood. instead, I resorted to an old woodworking trick and used white glue. I just put glue in the crack and sanded enough to get it to turn into a wood paste. Barely visible at this point. To deal with the cracks on the rim I picked up a cut off ash ring from an old project that just happened to be the right size (how often would that happen?). The lid is a piece of mahogany from an old plaque. Waste not want not.