Celtic Cross with Dragons Leather Flask

Well now that I've finished with the series on the box elder router bowls it's time to jump back into a new piece I've made.

A new tooled leather flask that I've just put up for sale. I love Celtic knot works, I love dragons. Together they make for a very nice combination in a great carved leather flask. Flasks are very stylish items and ones with iconic imagery are even cooler. Any of you Renaissance Fairs - Renaissance Festival, SCA, LARP, RPG, Celtic knot or other medieval fans will love to have an accessory like this.

Some of the pieces of art I make a very large and time consuming, such as my Art Deco stained glass lamp. But I like making smaller pieces too. They aren't nearly as time consuming, although this flask does represent about 4 hours of work. Sometimes the large pieces can be emotionally and creatively exhausting because I put so much into them. Pieces like this flask are still handsome, fun to make and practical without being so all-consuming.

For more pictures or to buy this Celtic knot and dragons flask please follow the link.

My first attempt at routed bowls - part 4

I left off with the box elder bowls looking like this:

The moisture content had dried down to 18% and was holding there and so I did the preliminary sanding as well as shaping the bottom with a round over bit at the router table. The round over bit created a fair amount of tear out on the end grain as you can see. So my next step is more sanding. I used my detail sander and 80 grit paper to smooth out the end grain issues and then stepped up to 120 and started smoothing everything else out as well as rounding out the lip of the bowl. Then up to 180 grit on everything, then 220 grit and finally hand sanding the entire bowl with 320 grit to give the bowl a fine polish sanding.

So here is the result after all of the sanding:

The fiery box elder is just stunning. I love the reds and the blues in the wood. Now it was during the sanding that I made my next mistake on these routed bowls. I mentioned that the end grain was soft before and I neglected to put any sanding sealer on the end grain during the sanding process. This would have helped when it came to putting on the finish, I'll talk about why in just a moment.

With the sanding done I wiped the bowls clean with tack cloth and started putting on the finish. For anything that might come into contact with food I like to use food safe finishes. My particular favorite is Howard Butcher Block Conditioner. The finish it gives is similar to tung oil. I've heard that any finish is food safe once it has fully cured but I'm a little leery of trying that out. And I really like this finish so I'm not to eager to switch.

The box elder looks all the more spectacular with the finish applied, don't you think? There is even a little bit of spalting in the wood, which is great. The knots at the bottom of the bowls prevent these from being able to hold liquids, but otherwise they will be of great use around food. They could serve as salad bowls, or hold nuts or candy around holidays. Or for a different bend they could have some clear glass beads added to the bottom and then become tea light or votive candle holders.

But I mentioned the problem of not adding sanding sealer to the end grain when finishing. What happens is end grain, particularly soft end grain, tends to soak up more finish than the rest of the bowl making it look darker or even sometimes blotchy. It's not too visible but it did happen some on these bowls, so it would have been better if I'd taken that step.

So that draws an end to my first attempt at routed bowls. A fun learning process with a few mistakes made along the way, but the end result was still a pair of lovely fiery box elder bowls.

My first attempt at routed bowls - part 3

I left off on the last post about routed bowls with letting the bowls do some air drying and as it turns out warping.

I figured the one bowl that I cut away the outer block would warp more than the bowl that I left the outer block attached, take a look at my last post on routed bowls if you aren't sure what I'm talking about :) As it turns out I pretty much didn't know what I was talking about. Each bowl warped about equally. So once I saw that the bowls were starting to warp I did what I could to counteract the warpage. The box elder wood I was using had a tendency to warp in an oval inwards towards the bowl opening. This warp seemed to follow the grain so that the longest part of the oval ran to the end grain. This may be obvious to experienced green wood workers or bowl turners but this was my first time using green wood and making a bowl.

So to try to counteract the warping I put some weight on the bowl trying to force it back to round. I first started with the bottom of the bowl, which was cupping up towards the end grain. On each bowl I put about 8 to 10 lbs of weight on the bottom to try to flatten the bottom back out. I left the weights on the bowls as they continued to air dry and had pretty good success with that. Although the oval shape was still obvious, especially on the bowl that I cut away the outer block. So on that bowl I turned it on its side and put the weight on one end of the oval. Again I left it to continue drying and had some success there as well.

Well, after letting the bowls dry for a few days the moisture content got down to 18% and pretty much decided to stay there (I live in a very humid environment, so I figured that was as good as it was going to get). So I decided it was time to get back to finishing the shaping. Honestly, I couldn't wait. I was chomping at the bit to get back to working on these!

So I cut away the outer block on the second bowl at the band saw and I was ready to roll. The next step was to rough sand away all of the cut marks from the band saw on the outside, which you can see here:

I swear I should get paid for product placement in these pictures ;) So far I've shown you my Craftsman band saw, my DeWalt router and my Ridgid oscillating spindle sander. Just wait, in two more pictures you are going to see a whole bunch of tools, lol. Anyway, I also sanded the bottom of the bowls relatively flat with the belt sander attachment on the sander too. I'll do some final leveling later with the finish sanding.

The important thing is that with the outer bowl rounded and smoothed with the sander I could take it to the router table and cut the bottom edge profile into the bowl. I used a round over bit to create a nice shape across the base as well as give a nice edge to the base, which you can see here:

Box elder apparently is pretty soft wood, softer than I was expecting anyway. I ended up with a fair amount of tear out and burn marks when doing the routing, especially around the end grain. So this was going to require quite a bit of sanding later to smooth out. But live and learn.

So next I rolled out the drill press to use two different sanding attachments for the initial sanding of the inside of the bowl. The first attachment is for sanding the sides of the bowl, which you can see here:

See, I told you there would be a lot of product pictures. You can see my Craftsman drill press, my Craftsman table saw, my Craftsman jointer, my Ryobi planer, my Ryobi compound miter saw... So anyway, next up was to sand the inside bottom, which takes another specialty attachment. The real money isn't in making the pieces, it's in selling the attachments that make the pieces. Lord knows, they have enough of my money. So here you can see that attachment too:

I ran into a bit of a problem with this attachment. It's sanding ability is much more vigorous than the sanding attachment for the sides of the bowls. What happened was when running this attachment around the bottom and the bottom sides it actually created a recess in the sides. Oops. I'll have to be more careful about that in the future. This time it just meant doing some extra sanding on the sides to correct it.

So it was at this point that I left off for that day. In the next post I'll pick up on the finish shaping and sanding and then applying finish.

Walnut heartwood and stained glass lamp

I'm going to take a break today from the routed bowls series while the wood continues to dry. Instead today I'm going to focus on a new piece that I really love the result.

Back when I lived in Michigan I had a great source for air dried Michigan walnut and cherry woods. The wood was cut down from the seller's own farm and had been air drying in a barn for about 10 years. He was a craftsman himself but realized he had more wood than he could use in a lifetime in that barn so he sold me some. A couple of the walnut pieces had great heartwood figuring on the ends. Not great wood if you are trying to make furniture or something with nice even grain, but quite precious if you are looking for truly spectacular wood. Wood so beautiful that it's grain pattern in itself is a work of art.

Well, I had two pieces of the heartwood, each one about 8 to 10 inches in length and about an inch thick. I knew I wanted to do something special with them. Something that would really display the beauty of the grain as well as the unique shapes of the pieces. And so I made 2 accent lamps or table lamps. Here is the walnut heartwood and stained glass lamp I'm focusing on today:

You can see that what I did was to take a single piece of the heartwood and resaw it down the middle to get to evenly matched opposite pieces that would make up the wood sides of the lamp. Then I sanded and sanded and sanded. I couldn't really run pieces of heartwood like this through the planer because it would tear the crap out of the ends. So I had to sand it all down smooth, and of course wood this gorgeous has to be sanded to a very high grit to really bring out the depth in the grain. So a lot of hard work, yes, but the end result is well worth it.

As you can see the shape is rather unique, because I wanted to use the live edge of the heartwood, not just shape it into a rectangle or square, I wanted the grain of the wood to define the shape of the piece.

This accent lamp or desk lamp also has 2 Victorian stained glass panels. I used nice bold complementing colors so that the stained glass wouldn't be overshadowed by the heartwood. I think I achieved a pretty nice balance between the two. I particularly like the red jewels in the center of the panels because even in full daylight they just glow with color. As always for more pictures and information or to purchase this lamp, please follow the link to the walnut heartwood and stained glass lamp.

My first attempt at routed bowls - part 2

I left off on the last post ready to start routing so let's fire up the router and start cutting away the inside of the bowl.

Because the box elder wood is still green, each pass with the router is very quick and easy. Like cutting through butter. It also creates less dust and larger shavings. This is just after the first pass with the router:

To make the pass I angled the router bit into place to create an initial divot that allowed me to flatten the router out and then rout out the rest of the area. Each pass is fairly shallow, about 3/16". As you can see it creates a lot of shavings so I had to vacuum out the shavings after each pass. On the Woodsmith Shop when they made routed bowls they used the plunge base router. I found it easier to use the fixed base router, because it made depth adjustment really easy. Then it was a matter of just routing out each new depth, vacuuming and adjusting the depth until I reached the maximum depth of the router without the collet extension.

As you can see it's not terribly deep, about 1" or so. You might be wondering why I didn't just start with the collet extension on in the first place. Simple, on my router, DEWALT DW618PK, with the collet extension added the minimum depth I could get would be much too deep for an initial first pass. In other words, I couldn't get the router set shallow enough with the collet extension to start off with it. So I added on the collet extension, which you can see greatly increases my depth of cut.

So it was back to successive passes, gradually working away at removing the wood for the inside of the bowl. Really it was kind of fun to do. Once I started getting close to the depth I wanted, I used my combo square to measure the total depth from the outside including the template and then backed it off by 3/8", which would give me the inside depth I wanted. I know that 3/8" depth is somewhat thicker than you would normally make the bottom thickness for a wood bowl, but I wanted to add some extra depth to the rough cut, figuring it would give me a little bit of extra wiggle room to even out the bottom after warping from the wood drying.

Then I reached my final cut and took off the template:

You can see the grain pattern on the bottom of the inside is going to look awesome once it's sanded and finished!

Now here is where I started doing some variation between the two bowl blanks. One of the blanks I left in this stage to start the drying process, hoping that perhaps the solid outer block would minimize warpage. The other blank I took to the band saw and cut away the outer block, as you can see here:

So this is where I left it at the end of the first day. Two blanks, 1 cut to rough dimension both inside and out and the other cut only on the inside. So it was time to let the wood start to do some air drying - and warping as it turns out on both. So I'll pick up in the next post about the warping and what I did to try to counter act it.

My first attempt at routed bowls - part 1

I'll be the first to admit that I am still learning as a craftsman. Since I work in wood, stained glass and hand tooled leather, I have all that much more to learn to really master my trade. But the great thing about learning as I go is that its a fun process.

I'll be doing a series of posts about a new project - routed bowls. I have never made any kind of bowls before. I have no experience turning wood on the lathe and am not really inclined to try to learn turning at this point. I don't have enough shop space, I don't have the money for all the new tools and I have enough other things I want to do that it isn't a high priority. But I do like wooden bowls, so when I saw an episode on the Woodsmith Shop about routed bowls I figured I wanted to explore them.

My birthday just passed recently, and that is usually the time when I get some new toys, err, tools for my workshop. ;) This year I asked for a bowl cutting router bit, as well as the bowl sanding kit. I already had pretty much everything else I needed for this project.

I also had a block of fiery box elder wood I'd bought on Ebay for another project for a client but that deal fell through. So I had a spare block of waxed, green wood sitting around with no purpose. Now, I'll be completely honest here - I have never worked with green wood before. This whole project is completely new to me and I figured I'd go ahead and share it with you, as I go through the learning (and error) process, step by step.

Routed bowls can only have a maximum depth of a little less than 3 inches, including using the router collet extension. The block of box elder was about 5 1/2" thick, so rather than waste the wood, I resawed it on the band saw into two blocks (at the same time cutting away all of the wax), so I could make 2 bowls.

Here are the two blocks, first from the top:

And here are the 2 blocks of wood from the bottom:

As you can see, this box elder has unbelievable coloring and grain. At this point the moisture content of the wood is about 40%. And yes, I went ahead and routed out the inside with the wood at 40% moisture. I know all of you wood turners are shaking your heads at me right now, but remember I'm doing this as a learning project and also to do some experimenting. I wanted to see how much warp was going to happen in two different ways. On the first blank I routed out the inside and cut the outside to rough shape at the band saw all on the first day. On the second block I only routed out the inside but left the outer block intact to see what effect that would have on reducing warping.

In the top picture you can see that I drew 2 circles on each block, one for the inner dimensions and one for the outer dimensions. To route that inner circle I needed a template, which I made from a piece of leftover 3/4" melamine, starting with rough cutting on the jigsaw and finishing on the sander:

I know that the template doesn't look all that round in the picture, but it's really just the picture as well as the melamine surface. The template is quite round, I promise.

I also needed a large face plate for my router so that it would sit and move on the template without tipping. I used a piece of 3/8" thick clear acrylic (plexiglass), cutting out the center holes and the screw holes on the drill press. As you can see I've got the large face plate mounted to my router along with the bowl cutting router bit, but NOT with the collet extension yet.

As you can see at this point I've needed quite a lot of tools just to get started with this project:

• Band saw - to resaw the wood blank to size and cut away the wax


• moisture meter - to check the moisture content of the wood and commit the sin of making bowls out of green wood :)


• compass - to trace out the inner and outer circles as well as trace the template


• jig saw - to rough cut the template


• oscillating sander - to sand the circle on the template to final shape


• power drill - to screw the template to the blank


• drill press - to cut the holes for the router face plate


• hole saw - to cut the center hole on the face plate


• forstner bit - to countersink the screw holes on the face plate and make sure they are the right depth since the 3/8" thick face plate is thicker than the normal face plate


• bowl cutting router bit

Whew, now that everything is set up, in the next post I'll pick up with starting to route out the bowls.

Maple and Purpleheart Stained Glass Candle Centerpiece

I know my last 2 posts have been on new tooled leather projects, but of course I don't work only in tooled leather. I have some gorgeous new pieces in wood and stained glass too. In fact this new piece has both wood and stained glass.

Artwork that is easy to provide "wow factor" is usually visually captivating in it's detail and intricacy. Sometimes however, the simple appearance of clean lines, gentle curves and beautiful colors can have it's own wow factor that grabs your eyes. This maple and purpleheart wood stained glass candle centerpiece falls into the latter category.

It wasn't simple to create. In fact, it's requirements for precision show me just how much I need a professional sized table saw. Or at the very least one with a truly flat table. But at the present I have neither the space or the budget for that upgrade. Sigh :)

This piece was fun to make and deceptive as to how much time went into it. I honestly spent twice as much time making this as I thought I would (although I still priced it based on how long I thought it should take in order to keep the price reasonable).

Before I even start my construction drawing on a piece I spend time visualizing in my head what I want to make. I visualize the overall finished project plus the necessary details that go into construction, such as joinery and material selection. When I visualized this piece I knew I wanted to make the wood parts from maple and purpleheart. They provide such an amazing color contrast that goes so well together. I also knew that I wanted the stained glass part to be visually different but at the same time to go well with the wood. Notice that the wood is about clean simple lines, while the stained glass has gentle, sweeping curves.

I cut the wood pieces to shape first and then selected my glass colors based on the wood - with help from my wife. She usually helps me decide on the stained glass colors I use. It often helps to have a second pair of eyes. She can't visualize the finished piece I see in my head (of course), she has to see the materials I'm working with to get a sense of how it will look. This works out well because sometimes what I visualize in my head doesn't look the same in reality ;)

Once I put the whole thing together I was finally able to see the end result and I was very happy with how it turned out. I definitely plan on making more of these! For larger pictures, more details or to purchase this piece please click on the link: Maple and Purpleheart Stained Glass Candle Centerpiece

Jolly Roger Flask - Hand Tooled Leather Pirate Flask

What can I say? Pirates are cool.

Buried treasure. Sailing the high seas. Sword fights. Rum, lots of rum :)

It's no wonder that pirates are such popular characters in movies and books. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is one of my favorite movies. Johnny Depp owned the role of Jack Sparrow. And Geoffrey Rush as Barbosa? Loved it.

The jolly roger is easily the most known of pirate symbols. It's cool, it's fearsome and, by the way, it looks very cool on a flask!

This tooled leather jolly roger flask holds 6 0z of your favorite rum, grog or other beverage. For more pictures, bigger pictures or to buy this flask just follow the link.