Pot Pourri bowls

I thought you might like to see what I have been upto,

Chestnut wood finished with wax. Rim undercut with a new tool bought specially for the job.

Home grown lavender and rose petals. Pewter lid from Axminster. 5" diameter, 3" high. The 3 rings are cut then burnt with copper wire.

Two bowls from one wood

Well I decided to throw caution to the wind and have a go.

Removing the plastic end caps was the first task. They appear to be made of some kind of acrylic which sent chards all over the workshop when hit with a mallet and chisel.

One side was quite a bit larger than the other which is too small at the moment to go in the expanding jaws of the chuck.

Once mounted on the lathe and at a very slow speed (360rpm) the slight bias of the bowl is evident in the video

The parting tool worked better than I expected, although the colour of the shavings threw me a bit. Yellow shavings from a dark brown wood.

The parting tool got me down down to about 3/4" of the centre. With only a slight fraying at the sides. I did widen the cut as I went deeper.

Finished the cut with the tenon saw.

2 halves

I read a number of articles that suggested that scraping lignum vitae was easier than using a gouge so a 1/2" scraper was used throughout. It goes without saying that lignum vitae is VERY hard and probably took about 1 to 1.5 hour to hollow out.

I wanted to keep the outside as original as possible and this particular wood had plenty of cracks and a markers mark.

I also wanted to keep the base as original as possible, so mounted on the button jaws I just cleaned up the recess a bit.

I need to improve the finish on the next one. Not sure if the marks here (the one on the right) are from streaks in the sanding sealer or from the tool. The one on the left has yet to be hollowed out.

The above was just a test run on one of the woods which had plenty of quite deep cracks with plenty of surface cracks. The "test" was worthwhile.

Here is a pair of bowls made from a different wood (that is wood in the bowling sense, it is still lignum vitae).
Note the carvings. These were impossible to clean up without losing the profiles so I left them alone. As the original manufacture of the woods seemed to require a 6mm hole being drilled though the centre of each wood a beech dowel was glued in place.

 

 

Finished with cellulose sanding sealer and carnuba wax

Exploding Concrete Tiles

Rather than have this years bonfire on one of the veg plots I thought I would use the small concrete area in front of the terrace that used to house a brick barbecue.
This would enable us to stand or sit more comfortably around the fire.

This seemed like a great idea...until one of the tiles exploded!

This is the aftermath after I have cleared up.

Fortunately we were not close to the fire at the time. Needless to say I will make the bonfire somewhere else next year.

With a pot over the hole no one will notice.

 There are 20 tiles there and all but the four on the left of the last photo are embedded in at least 4" of concrete which has so far prevented me from taking them up. How/why it was laid on that wonky alignment I will never know.

Courgette and Ginger Jam

Got fed up with kicking a 3kg marrow around the kitchen so found a recipe for some jam.

Tastes very good indeed. The ginger was grated from a fresh root and certainly adds a kick. According to the recipe the flavours intensifies the longer it is stored. Will try and remember to bring some the UK later in the year.

Another Frog

Planted up some hyacinth bulbs for christmas but when I went to water them the spout of the watering can was blocked. Normally I push a stick through to clear the blockage but could not do so this time.
Click on the white triangle and the video should play. If you click on the little open box to the bottom left of the video it will open in full screen but it is a bit out of focus.

By banging the watering can on the ground he eventually slipped back down the spout so I could get him out.


This one was quite a bit larger than the ones we found on the sunflower and on my head. Still not big enough to eat though.

We have not seen them in the garden at all before so surprising that we have seen 3 in such a short space of time.

Tree Frog

Before I came here I had only seen green frogs in books.

This is, I believe, a common tree frog and was found this morning about 6 feet up on the underside of giant sunflower head that had started to wilt and hang down.

Not quite big enough for the pot.

Ash goblet

This ash log was part a tree that came down locally a couple of years ago.

The resulting goblet will be entered in a competition on a website that I have frequented for many years. A kind of on-line woodworking club.

The finished vessel is 7.5" high and 2" diameter.


























Took me most of one afternoon.

Taking some decent photos proved to be more challenging than the wood turning.