So my little girl comes home from day care the other day with a magic wand… this was a stick painted gold… it looked surprisingly enchanted! So I think to myself, I have wood and resin and glitter, time for some magic (or experiments)

So I cut some timber and mixed some resin…

Things were looking hopeful but you would be surprised how well resin flows, particularly flows out of where it is supposed to be and onto the bench… after a top up and a wee whizz on the lathe we have magic prototype number 1:

With a few upgrades to the process (and the construction of some new tools for working with hard resin and soft timber at the same time) I have managed these:

I think it’s a pretty good start!

Thinking i would take this blowtorch business to the next level, i thought i might try to kind of burn a hole in the side of a shade… Turns out that you cant really maintain the integrity of the top rim if you do that, so you end up with what seems to me a bit like an impact site…

 

nice effect tho…

check it out more here

 

This little number is off to the ball… The compassion ball (the launceston one that is)!!!

It’s sporting a fancy new tag (it can’t exactly wear a dress now can it) and is hopefully it will make its way home with its true love (in a most respectable fashion of course)

So here is the latest experiment… wood, resin, and most importantly, GLITTER!

cut and  pour:

I actually had some quote significant leaks there… ended up with a lot of pretty glitter on the bench… its still there actually, its really hard.

so cut it up, get it in the lathe and then:

You will just have to imagine your own magic sound effects… they are not included in this project…

As i have alluded to before, whipping out the blowtorch is a great way of dealing with cracked stock (or stock that unexpectedly cracks after i turn it). As a bit of a side note, many of the pieces i make crack because they are cut from a single branch (because i like working with timber from scratch and cant handle big tree trunks).

 

Well lets just say that i went to town with the blowtorch on this one, leaving the inside looking a bit like what i imagine a teeny meteor would do to a tree trunk… :

This one also throws a pretty swanky light up the wall

check out more here

 

I have had the pleasure of having a nice wooden handle on the group handle of my little coffee machine… I made the originals years ago but I have just made a batch of nice hardwood handles…

You can buy yourself one here should you so desire!

If you need a hand determining if these puppies will work on your machine just get in touch!

Deep as that that title sounds, this is merely a post about me making another light shade. If you have been following along with my work (although I’m not certain how you would, unless you are one of my close friends), you would know that i have been making some lamp shades that feature some burnt… burntness… burning…

without further babbling, here is the time lapse of the thing whole saga:

Some of the journey that you might not have gleaned from the timelapse:

Things were coming along swimmingly, it was roughed out:

and had undergone some charring:

i was just shaping it down when… well…

Needless to say, i was forlorn… but it turns out that some glue and many clamps are sufficient to recover from such an incident… heres the finished piece (i ended up putting it on a different base):

and one last thing… you can buy it on etsy:

https://www.etsy.com/au/shop/JamIntheRound

For those of you following along at home, you can now buy a few of the bits and pieces that i have made on Etsy…

get  a go of it: https://www.etsy.com/au/shop/JamIntheRound

Its perhaps a little understocked at the moment and currently only ships in Australia but hey, its a start…

 

 

 

A cute little trick I have come up with, which heavily reduces the number of coats of varnish you need is this shonky little setup:

 

Basically I flip the belt off the lathe, attach a spit roast motor (through a system of random nuts, bolts and clamps) and let run as a very thick coat of varnish drys…
Here’s another video of the shade that I roughted out in the last post

 

So i work mainly from whole branches… with bark on… this is partly a decision of aesthetics and partly one of being tight… I love the knotty,  barkey effect that you get from working with the whole cross section of a log, lots of character… Buuuuuut i have also never paid actual money for stock timber…

so this is how i go from a lump of wood (poorly dried) to the start of a piece, in this case a light shade. Here’s the time lapse:

 

so basically, i mount it up, chip off some excess bark, roughly round it, cut in a chuck mount and bobs your father…

i also inset the chuck mount, this is a little trick that allows me to fit something into the recess for holding the shade onto a light fitting… just a little trick…