I seem to have been doing a lot of projects lately that involve significant amounts of time spent texturing wood with a wood burner. It can quickly become tedious, but the impact really is nice, especially when you pick the piece up and can feel the roughness. I turned a piece of cherry that really was bland. No strong grain pattern, no deep color, absolutely nothing to make the bowl appealing. I decided to burn a few flowers on it, then color in the petals with india ink to make them stand out.

As I started looking at the wood burning tips I had, I wondered if there was a way to leverage the fixed size of the tips to make the burning process simpler. My thought was rather than doing all the designs freehand, if I could “stamp” pieces of the design, it would be both faster and more consistent. On my second try, I hit the perfect combination of tips, resulting in flowers with eight petals that were VERY consistent in size and shape. My initial thought was to leave the bowl natural and only texture the very center of the flowers. That all changed when a new episode of a podcast I subscribe to started a new episode. The result was another bowl with an excessive amount of “fiddly work” completed to texture the whole thing.

I figured I’d start working on something else and went upstairs to get something to drink while I considered what might be fun. As I was looking through a cabinet for the missing lid on my glass, I found a tall, cylindrical, glass, vase. It could have come from IKEA, but most likely it was left over from an old anniversary rose my former company used to give to their employees. Either way, I started thinking and the next project was chosen.

I went out to the shop and found a piece of maple I had roughed out a long time ago, intending to make a vase. It was dry, had warped a little, but was perfect for the next project. Using a forstner bit, I drilled a hole that was slightly bigger than the glass vase, completed smoothing out the outside shape to remove the warping, and headed back downstairs. Rather than do the exact same design as what was on the bowl, I decided to see if the same process could be used to make consistent 5 petaled flowers. Turns out, with a larger fishtail bit, the process works pretty good!

A couple of days later, I was finished with a companion piece to the bowl. In all honesty, I also have no sense of feeling on the side of one finger from all the heat coming off the wood burner. Oh well, it was worth it.

Not sure where I’ll take this, or if I’ll do more of this, but for now, I love these two!