Vine Knife

This is a mass-market dagger that I bought from a distributor. It originally had a hideous American flag and bald eagle motif painted on the handle and sheath. I sanded the handle and sheath clean of their factory finish and used a dremel tool to carve a vine pattern into both sides of the handle. I had wanted to do something similar to the sheath, but I couldn't think of a suitable design. This knife sat in a drawer, unfinished, for over ten years, before I decided I just needed to be rid of it. So, I painted the handle and sheath white and fixed a silver pentagram applique to the sheath. My hopes for the sheath had been much higher, but I was suffering some sort of creative block and could not think of what I wanted to do with it, so I decided to just be done with it. Perfect is the enemy of finished. 

 

Ash Bowl

 A few years ago, my daughter asked me to make her a fruit bowl. I'm still working on that one. I kinda suck at turning bowls, and as that project was not going so well, I decided I needed some practice before continuing. So, I dug out some old bowl blanks that I rough cut from the very first batch of logs that I ever sourced off the internet. These ash bowl blanks have been sitting around drying for about eight years. I ended up giving this bowl to my daughter to tide her over until her nice cherry fruit bowl gets finished.

 

Planchettes v2.0

 This is another post of a small batch of items that was made for sale at my store before it closed. I was hoping to create a line of planchettes that I could cut out completely on the laser cutter, and that would require less hand finishing than the solid wooden planchettes that I had previously made. Unfortunately, they still required more hand finishing than I had hoped, and I was unhappy with the quality of the final product. I only made one batch of them, and while they did sell, I considered this a failed product experiment.

 

 

Top

Bottom

 

These were cut from multiple layers of 3mm plywood, instead of solid wood like my previous planchettes. The intention was to create stock design parts (uppers and lowers) that could be mixed and matched. Between sanding painting and gluing the layers together, there was no significant labor savings, and IMO the product was inferior to the solid wood planchettes or the solid wood with laser engraving planchettes.