I’ve been working through a very large stash of maple bowl blanks and after awhile, maple gets to be pretty boring to work with, especially if it’s straight grained wood with no spalting. It’s easy to turn, but it’s about as generic as you can get. Think of it like eating ice cream any time you want, but it’s only vanilla with no sprinkles. That’s not a bad thing (some people may think that’s great), but for me, it doesn’t take long before I’m dreaming of being spoon deep in a half gallon of Moose Tracks.

So what do I do when things stat to get boring? Go find some sprinkles!

I was working on the smaller bowl later in the evening, when some real asshat neighbors started lighting off fireworks. Since I’ve lived here, it’s been pretty much a repeating indication of the season. Starting about the second week of June until some time about the middle of July, fireworks will be lit off just about every night. It’s usually only about 20 minutes or so between the first explosion and the last, but as the 4th approaches, it become longer with the time between explosions getting shorter. If the neighborhood is lucky, the “show” will be over by 10:00, but every once in awhile it’ll be more like midnight to 2:00. It makes me wonder just how much money they spend each year on something that’s illegal in this state and why the local police haven’t been able to figure out who is begging for a ticket. Sometimes it’s just bottle rockets or Roman candles, but there’s usually at least one, big, colorful, explosion that will light up the sky, shake the windows, and make every dog in the neighborhood bark, pee, or hide under a bed.

When I heard the window rattler go off, I started thinking about some creative way to add fireworks to a project, like some carving filled with glow in the dark powder in resin. Then, as my mine is prone to do, I started to drift. Maybe instead of fireworks ON the project, I could put fireworks IN the project. If I could find the horrible neighbors and pick up all the pink and red sticks from the arsenal of bottle rockets they’ve shelled the neighborhood with, I could cast them in resin somehow. As a bonus window rattler set the next door neighbor’s dogs howling, I thought to myself “what kind of person is that patriotic? It’s not like Captain America lives here”. That was the thought that stuck: Captain America.

The first bowl was really just a proof of concept piece to plan out the steps. Turning the bowl was easy, then came adding the stars. I printed a pattern, then used the indexing function of my lathe to make sure they were aligned evenly, traced them on the bowl and used a wood burner to etch them into the side of the bowl. Blue spray paint was next, which covered the burnt part, but left an indented line where the starts needed to go. So far, so good! When the paint was dry, I went back to the woodburner to re-establish the hard line that would outline the while start. That’s where things started to go wrong. It turns out, if you burn through enamel spray paint, it melts, leaving a scorch mark in the wood flanked by two little mini-dams of paint. At first, I tried to paint the stars using acrylic paint, keeping the pain inside the burned part and thought the little mini-dams would help. They didn’t, the white paint went through the dams in some places, and into the burned part in others. It look really, really, bad. When the acrylic paint dried, I took the wood burner back down the now familiar path around the stars and discovered another issue. When the heat hit the wood, it melted the spray paint again and caused it to leach out into and under the white paint. Damn! I tried it again, only this time I switched to enamel paint. HIt it with the wood burner to clean up the lines and it was worse than the acrylic paint. I ended up going back to the acrylic paint, tried multiple coats and used a small dental pick to clean up as much of the “oops” places as I could. I decided to call this one done and move on to a second try.

On the second bowl, I started with a wider, shorter bowl and replicated the same basic process. When the blue paint was drying, I looked at it and thought “that’s way too much blue, it needs something to break up the blueness”. I landed on red spray paint and tried to control the spray so that there was some kind of fading from blue to red. Then, it was on to the same exact battle I had had before on the first bowl. This time, I went straight to the acrylic paint and dental tools. It still looks a little sloppy to me, but from across the room it gets the aesthetic I was going for.

I’m already thinking about the next one and how I can get the blue confined to the band with the stars, then red and white stripes on the rest of the bowl. I think I’ve got the spacing figured out, but I don’t even start it until I can find a better solution for the sloppy stars.