trinket pot

Hi all,
In my last post I told you that I had a bit of pyrography on the go; I wanted to do something quick so I had a go at one of the trinket pots I purchased a while ago. I like these little trinket pots because they always come up nice with a bit of pyrography on them.

I had been mulling the idea of using my pyrography iron to make a trinket pot look as if it had been woven like a little basket. I had a couple of false starts when it came to drawing the pattern on the pot but in the end I came up with a method that worked for me. In fact, I did very little drawing and burnt most of the pattern onto the wood freehand with my pyrography iron.

Here is a picture of the finished pot, I hope you like it. I think it looks cute, but I'm probably biased.

At first glance, it probably looks like a big task to produce something like this, but the reality is, for anybody with decent hand to eye coordination, it is not as difficult as it might seem.

Believe it or not, but it took less than an hour to do the pyrography on this pot so it's worth having a try if you want to produce something fairly quickly.

The secret is to break the pot down into sections. I drew a line around the pot from north to south so that I had the sphere cut in half and then I quartered it. Once this was done, it was easy to mark the pot in equal parts. Just imagine a peeled orange with the segments running vertically.

For the horizontal lines, I just imagined the tropics going around the world and drew two lines accordingly. Once I had those pencil lines in, the rest was done with the pyrography iron. I burnt in two short horizontal lines on the tropics, then drew one in the middle which would be the equator and then another line between those two.

My explanation is probably as clear as a bottle of ketchup, so here is a picture showing the sequence of the line burning.

Once you get started you will find that it is all about burning straight lines which make little boxes. Two edges, one in the middle and two more to fill in the gaps.

I used my usual spoon tip on a medium heat to make sure I avoided over burn marks. The finish was three coats of Ronseal clear gloss varnish and I will flock the bottom and insides when I do some flocking on my next project.

Talking of the next project. I am finally getting around to making a box on my scroll saw and then decorating it with pyrography. I have made a start and will show you my progress in my next post.