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I had mentioned that we closed the woodshop for couple of months. We were thinking about (and got real close to) moving which meant having a clean, presentable space. Which is the opposite of how our shop works. So it closed and we cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. And then we showed and showed and showed. In the end we stayed in our home, which is great, and the shop—and life—goes on.
The reason I bring all this up is in the cleaning period a discovery was made. A few years ago I had come into possession of some fresh cut wood—which was believed to be ash. After breaking the fairly large logs down into some workable pieces I bagged everything up in plastic to help manage the moisture loss. For those of you who don't think in terms of wood—most of you—fresh wood is wet, and as it dries it shrinks. cracks, and warps. If you can control the rate of moisture loss you can mitigate things like cracking and warping. Or you can be like me, and forget about the whole affair.
I had bagged up these chunks of tree with the plan of re-bagging them every 2 months so that the moisture could be slowly lost in a controlled environment. What happened instead was that 8-9 months after the initial bagging I finally removed the bags from the woodshop during the cleaning process. I opened one up to find that a new ecosystem had evolved inside of the thick plastic bags. Hot, wet, and fungal, the tree bits were black and disgusting. Fearing the worst—black mold—I threw all but one bag away (big mistake). The bag I saved was the one I opened, because—in all honesty—I didn't want to have to re-bag it. So I placed the swampy wood in the farthest reaches of my back yard and got on with life. A month later, we didn't move, the shop is reopened and I come back to this wood in my back yard. Still black, but now rain and wind had cleared away some of the gross. Curiosity, a filtered face mask, and thick gloves brought one of the logs inside and after clearing off the outer layer of... stuff... what was left was gorgeous. The wood was permeated by the mold which left wonderful dark streaks though the grain. I used what I could, as the wood wasn't all the choicest cuts—and only got a couple of pieces out of it—but it was worth the effort.
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Next up: fun with scrap. If there's one think I have a lot of, it's scrap wood. Tried my hand at fashioning letter-openers from thin strips of scrap. First one is oak, and it's enormous (for when you're opening your birthday cards), and the second is a much more manageable Walnut opener.
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During the summer months we elected to spruce up our kitchen; new coat of paint, some woodwork—ya’know—the usual. First effort was to beautify the family chalkboard. I reframed it in pine and cedar:
Next to-do was to dress up our cabinet tops with some antiques and fresh turned produce. The produce was made from pine scraps and twigs for stems—except for the pumpkin, which was made from a chunk of oak (that has a huge crack in it). Here's a couple shots of those:
Last. though not least, is the oak book holder. I cook a lot and on Father’s Day was given a copy of America’s Test Kitchen's Complete Cookbook. It's great, and great-big, so a holder seemed like a good idea. The book came form my parents, which is fitting as the oak came our of their kitchen—rescued when they remodeled some time ago. For the other wood workers who might be reading: this project was fun because I had just a 8x1x36ish piece of oak that I re-sawed and hand-planed to make this work. The curves were all hand sawn and sanded. Here's a pre-finish and post finish comparison (finished with Dutch Oil and nothing else), and some detail pics:
As winter approached there wasn't much time spent in the shop, though one gift request was fulfilled. A simple cross made of red cedar with proud mahogany inlay:
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As winter gave way to spring I got my but back into the shop and have been doing prep-work for more than a handful of projects, but have managed to complete a few more, like this pine log bowl, which I lovingly call the Bowl of Sauron for it’s great burning All-Seeing Eye. Finished with dark oils, sanded down and top-coated with amber shellac.
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Deja vu: after seeing my book holder my step-dad made no bones about wanting one for himself, as he has the same book. Not really wanting to tread the same path so soon I made a different kind of book holder—and his kitchen's quite different so it made sense. Much like the other book holder, this piece was made from one of my last walnut boards. It was at first intended to be ALL walnut, so I could bookend the walnut grain (which I didn't do with the oak book holder), but I quickly realized that I didn't have enough material. Red cedar has been my go-tp for accenting this beautiful walnut grain and it works really well here. I used boiled linseed oil and a wipe-on polyurethane to bring out the grain and color depth of both woods, which I was very pleased with.
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Well, that's all for now. We have plenty in the works so I'll pul all that together for you to see—maybe by next year. See you then.
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