All the effort that you hope leads to something good
Visual journal | Making small items to sell
A little update: Hello! I’ve been making a lot of small stuff, or at least attempting to, the past couple of weeks. It’s amazing how even small things can take a long time.
I don’t think I have any funny anecdotes or quips to share today. Clearly I’m off my game. Or Josiah, my humorous, offbeat partner, has let me down. Because generally my off-the-cuff updates are based on something he said. I’ll try to do better next time.
A visual journal entry is below (no essay this week!). I hope your next couple of weeks are filled with more jokes than you know what to do with. ❤️
I’ve been working on a few different ideas for coat rack hooks, which involved cutting out a lot of angled pieces and deciding the angles didn’t work for me. I finally got one piece where I liked it and then rounded all the edges. It’s the one on the left just below. I think I’m happy with it. Not so sure about the one on the right.
Dad and I spent a good bit of time yesterday morning making bookmark blanks. When I got to his shop, I found a pile of cut offs next to his table saw and immediately started going through them. They’re from the stack of boards in the upper left hand photo—he’s making a sauna for a friend of his and these Green Ash boards will be the front and back of the sauna. In cutting them down to width, he made a lot of scraps, many about 1/16” thick, some up to 3/8” thick. I’ve always loved other people’s piles of useless materials.
We sanded them then cut them into 6 1/2” and 7” lengths. In the coming week or so, I’ll go through the blanks and start carving into them and finishing them in various ways to make bookmarks.
I’ve been working on my inlay skills, which, um, need a lot of work. My first attempt was a stem with flowers (the image comes from Roshaan Ganief’s great book Small-Scale Woodworking Projects for the Home) and it was full of gaps all along the edges. I rooted through my children’s massive pile of broken crayons and found a few colors I liked, then melted them and pored wax into the gaps. I thought the purple was interesting.
Currently I’m practing my inlays with wood, because I have loads of scraps and they are way cheaper than the material that I eventually want to inlay: mother of pearl. That last photo is 3 ounces of pearl. How much did that cost? Around $70. So you can bet your bippy it’ll be awhile before I actually attempt to cut and inlay it into any project.
And here’s a cabinet I have been admiring (sorry the image is a little blurry). It was made by Ashley Pieper, a woodworker in Pennsylvania, who was kind enough to give me a bit of her time when I reached out to her months ago about woodworking. She does lovely work.
Thanks for reading! I hope you have a wonderful day.
I worked in the shop of a display company for 20 years. I always loved looking at the odd cut-offs of lumber and trim moldings we ‘produced’. We hired an older experienced woodworker and one day, when things got slow, he brought in on of the most amazing mosaics I’ve ever seen. He had a small shop in his garage and sorta out of the blue he picked some interesting little left-over pieces and glued them together into a sort of puzzle. Some were taller than others, some nice small pieces of rare woods and some were strangely angled bit of cheaper stock. Some were dark, some light toned, and some were old faded paint. Over the years it grew to be around 4’X6’ and he brought it to the shop to have our painter spray a clear coat on it. It’s been at least 35 years since I saw it in person but I can still see it in my head.
So anyway I was going to suggest that maybe if you started something like that with the odd scraps and chunks you could do some interesting abstract mosaics to sell beside the intricate pieces. If nothing else you can look at it when you’re ok’d line me and remember the project you did with black walnut or teak or all that oak CR7, sort of like a diary. Thanks for sharing your projects.