Needle Pot

Hi all,
I'm a bit late with this post, I made the needle pot that I am featuring here just over a week ago. The sharp eyed may have already seen a picture of it on the woodturning's page but I thought I'd give it a mention here. As usual time is short because my wife is always thinking of ways to keep me occupied, while I'm working on one task for her, she is busy adding to the list of other things that she need doing. On top of that, Spring is here and the garden also needs my undivided attention.

Ah well I shouldn't moan. I decided to do a needle pot, I call it a needle pot even though my wife has filled it with tooth picks. She has never been big on sewing.

Anyway, I thought a needle pot would be a change from making pens, but at the same time be relatively quick. I did a quick sketch of the shape I was aiming for and did a leaf design that I would burn into the pot with my pyrography iron.
Here's the sketch.

I would turn the wood from a 35mm square spindle that would finish up about 75mm tall. The species of wood is unknown because it came from a bag of off cuts that I recently purchased when visiting ockenden-timber.
If you haven't been to okenden timber I can recommend it. The prices are fair and it is in a beautiful part of the country on the Welsh border near Church Stoke. It takes me the best part of 2 hours to get there, but it a lovely journey.

One of the things I liked about making this needle pot was that I didn't have to hollow it out. I just put a large forstner bit into my jacobs chuck and drilled the inside out.

Once the pot was turned, I drew my leaf design onto it freehand and then burnt it in with my Peter Childs pyrography iron, using a spoon tip.
Here is a picture of the finished pot.

It looks quite nice but I'm not 100% happy with it. Firstly, the leaves on the lid are a bit bigger than the leaves on the pot and this ruins the harmony of the piece. The second thing I don't like is the colour of the leaves, they are just too bright. I would have probably been better to leave them plain but I was experimenting. I had read in a couple of places about people using sharpie markers to colour their wooden projects. This seemed to me to be a good idea and easier than messing about with stains so I thought I'd give it a go.

I was aiming for an Autumnal look, so I coloured them mostly with a light yellow marker and just put a dab of orange here and there. After applying the marker colours the pot looked pretty good, however, the problem with the colour arose as soon as I applied the first coat of finish, which in this case was CA or superglue as it is generally known.

The CA must have reacted with the colour in the marker pens and it left me with a decision to make. Should I live with the colour or should I sandpaper it off, which would take most of the pyro work with it.

I choose the former and decide to finish the pot as it was and learn by the mistake. Has it happens, my wife really likes the colour so it didn't turn out too bad. If you have and comments about the pot please let me know.