Gone Potty

Hi all, I think I'm going potty. If you remember my last post, where I described my encounter with the big wooden club, you will forgive me for going small. In fact, I am really enjoying making smaller objects like pots.

I recently put a small piece of scrap sepele onto the lathe and thoroughly enjoyed turning this little pot. It took just over an hour and was easy to finish with a bit of stick wax followed by some microcrystaline wax made by chestnut.
I've put a 2p coin in the photo to show the scale.

These small pots also have the advantage of  easy hollowing. All I do is put a jacob's chuck into the tailstock and drill the centre out with a forstner bit of the appropriate size.

The next pot I made was from a piece of sycamore. I burned a ring around the centre of the knob with a wire and did the same around the centre of the pot. A small groove is cut with a skew chisel to give the wire something to run in while burning. I then divided the space between the two burnt bands into triangles with my pyrography iron. These were then coloured with various shades of chestnut stain.

Before I did the colouring I did a bit of experimenting with various methods of colouring wood and whether it was better to use sealer before or after colouring.

I tried Chestnut wood stains, some inks that I use in my airbrush and sharpie markers. I know that a lot of woodturners are using sharpie markers and thought they might be easier to use than ink or stains. The sharpies were certainly much easier to use but I'm afraid that the results were not to my liking, The inks were also less appealing than the chestnut stains so I will be sticking to them in the future. Regarding the sanding sealer, I found that is much better to use it after the stain has been applied for projects like this where you want the stain to penetrate the wood. However, if you are doing colouring like on the pot below it is better to apply the sealer first so that the stain sits on the wood and mixes well with the other colours.

Anyway, the coloured pot was a success and I'm going to expand the theme and go a little big. Not clubbing wood size, but at least a little bigger.

By the way, just in case anybody is interested. When I was 16, my dad dragged me off to Australia, I didn't want to go but had no choice. Anyway, I wrote about my episode down under in a book called "The Reluctant Pom" and I am giving away free downloads this week on Amazon.

The book will be free from the 12th of July until the 14th and can be downloaded by clicking on the books tab at the top of the page and then the books cover, which will take you straight to the link on Amazon. Please grab a copy and have a good laugh.