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.