A lot of excitment can happen

 I think its over a year since I posted anything, if that is slack there is no  other excuse than I have been busy.

This urchin is made from a lump of knotty rimu that had a few splits in it, the width is 240mm and 100mm high.

The carving was intense and took well over a week then the painting, now it graces the poster for our pop up art gallery.

An other challenge was this 3 in one piece, turned on the lathe in one piece

so there was many changes in how it was held whilst I worked on each bowl, the wood is eucalyptus that I was given just after the tree came down.

The design in the middle is my own but also well known as a Celtic knot, the overall width is the maximum I could turn on the lathe over the lathe bed, such a fun piece to make and see finished.

I saw another piece on The World of Woodturners by Bruce Jones that had me eager to have a go, yes all these have started by what I have seen on WoW.

I had almost finished this when I returned it to the lathe for a last bit of work it was at a fragile state, the kokopelli took to flying and crash landed smashing the lower part, a new and better stage was made so the dance and music will go on.

About 300mm high the top hollow form is eucalyptus and the stage is acacia.

Old, new here

 This is a piece that I made a while ago but did not show here.

This is a piece of Puriri  a tree that was cut down close to where I live it normally takes a long time to dry so this was still wet when I started the work on it, the yellow wood is the sap wood so the dark wood is the hart wood, there was some rot in it which I carved away.

The length is 240mm and the height is 70mm, painted with acrylic paints and finished with a rattle can of satin spray.

Just finished

 I wanted to see how accurate I could be at piercing a thin turned dish/bowl.

This is a piece of eucalyptus about 240mm wide and 70mm high, this eucalyptus was cut down about the middle of 2023 and turned to a thick walled piece till it dried then turned so the carved area was 3 to 4mm thick that was the easy part, the piercing, carving and pyrography took about 4 weeks to do.

Takes a while, but it's worth waiting for

 Yes I got despondent about blogging but here I am now.

And a lot has happened, everything I make now takes weeks though I mostly only work at it for a few hours each day more so now that we are in winter.

Forming the handles and the carving of the pattern were both new experiences for me, I seem to remember doing the carving twice as I learnt that I could do better the painting was a whole big experiment too that came out as good or better than I could have hoped for.

The wood is Rimu a native to NZ that had some big splits in it that were

all glued up using epoxy glue.